


Most Wanted

by Likerealpeopledo



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-12
Packaged: 2018-04-01 03:17:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 27,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4003798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Likerealpeopledo/pseuds/Likerealpeopledo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Bank Robbery AU</p><p>It's a story as old as time.  Boy meets girl after he loses his medical license.  Boy and girl rob a bank together.  Because why not them?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Based On a Mostly True Story

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Smapdi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smapdi/gifts).



 

Danny Castellano had read once that Butch Cassidy was a leader of men, but he’d be damned if he could tell you why.Throughout his lifetime, on multiple occasions, Danny wished Butch could have just explained it.Because if he had, just the once, maybe Danny wouldn’t be on the lam right now, an overly chatty Indian girl in his passenger seat and thirty million dollars cash in the back.

He’d worn out the VHS cassette tape of _Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid_ that his Mom had bought him one Christmas, back when she was trying to teach him how to be a man without having an actual man living in their house.She’d been on some kind of Paul Newman kick, Danny realized later, as he reminisced about his steady diet of _Cool Hand Luke_ and _The Hustler_ and _The Sting._ He’d passed so many lazy Saturday afternoons watching those movies, memorizing them, emulating them; even though he was supposed to be helping his kid brother, Richie, with his science homework, or mowing the overgrown lawns of neighborhood retirees for spending money.

Maybe he was just avoiding his responsibilities, or maybe, even back then, he knew that he wasn’t meant for the life he had.

He couldn’t be.

Danny worked hard, to the bone, so that he didn’t have to be stuck just dreaming of the life that he wanted.

When he got into medical school, his Mom had cried, because she didn’t know how she was going to pay for it, on top of how proud she was that he’d been accepted.It had broken his heart in six different ways, none of which he had words to express, only that he promised himself that he wasn’t ever going to trouble her with the minutiae of his finances again.

So Danny worked three jobs the summer before medical school: delivering pizzas, landscaping, working on a lobster boat, all to pay his first semester’s tuition.Until he found out that he could make in one night what he made in a month, and Diamond Dan the Stripping Med Student was born.

Medical school was hard, but his life until then had been harder, and he’d survived that well enough.He specialized in obstetrics and gynecology, because why the hell not, and it made his Ma puff up at bridge parties like she’d just won the lottery, or if Father Francis had complimented her lasagna.Her baby was a doctor, and he could prescribe her hormones to get her through _the change_ , a phrase she’d whisper to her friend, Dot, one of many curse words to begin with the letter _c_.

Only he never really got to the part where his mother could suitably brag about him at parties, because his childhood friend Stevie introduced him to a far more lucrative career path than just traditional medicine, and all he needed was a prescription pad and a can-do attitude.

Stevie's way of doing things maybe wasn't the most legal way, or the safest, but the mostly organized drug ring made Danny very rich, very quickly.  Between the money he'd made stripping and the money he'd made with Stevie, he could buy two apartments, pay off his Mom's mortgage, and keep his chronically unemployed younger brother Richie in a cute little condo in Ft. Lauderdale.  His paycheck from Shulman's for being an actual doctor was an after- thought, and somewhere deep down, Danny missed wanting to be the kid that his mom was most proud of, but not enough to stop.  

The Catholic guilt was even getting easier to assuage; it had gotten to the point that Danny just started on his dozen Hail Marys during the actual sins.Write a fake scrip, say an Act of Contrition, or three.Help Stevie beat up someone late on their payments, recite a couple of Our Fathers.Dismember a corpse (it was one time, and nothing he wanted to talk about), start a Rosary and call the priest in the morning.

Dr. Shulman was a kind man, with watery eyes and a permanently concerned furrow in his brow, and he’d hired Danny fresh out of school.From the slump of his shoulders, Danny could tell that he didn’t really relish anything that he was saying, but he had to say it anyway.“Dr. Castellano, you know that I’m required by state law,”And that was when Danny’s stomach dropped to his knees, because he had broken about three state laws just that morning, all before 10 a.m., “To report any goings-on that I may deem, uh, unbecoming to our profession, and I’ve been noticing that…”

He didn’t really hear anything else, not over the roaring of blood in his ears.If you paid him, Danny couldn’t remember how he got out of the office, or through the reception area, only that he was holding a box of Yankees memorabilia and a fishbowl of concert tickets and he was no longer employed as a doctor of medicine at Shulman and Associates, or anywhere in the state of New York. _Legal action is pending_ bounced through his frontal lobe, and he had a vague recollection of promising to cooperate with the investigation, and he really, really needed to call Stevie. And maybe punch him in the throat, just a little bit.

Danny waited until 5 p.m. to ride the Ferry back out to Staten Island for his weekly dinner with his mother, his office detritus flung into the nearest dumpster, making the only vow he knew how:Never let them see you sweat.Which for Danny was ironic, mostly because he was probably the sweatiest person he knew, but people didn’t have to know the constant turmoil that echoed through his insides.People didn’t have to know anything he didn’t want them to know.

Somehow he made it through dinner without bursting into tears, or exploding into a billion shards of over-anxious former doctor, and he never once looked his mother in the eye.There was nothing to tell, yet.If she noticed that Danny was out of sorts, she didn’t let on, and his stomach fisted itself into knots as he glided past the newly judgmental glare of the Statue of Liberty and back into the City.

The hallway to his Manhattan apartment smelled like chocolate and warm sugar, and he found his wife, Christina, hunched over the granite countertop, rolling dough into balls and dropping them unceremoniously onto a waiting cookie sheet.

Another woman to disappoint and it was barely nine o’clock. 

He didn’t want to delve into the question of why his wife’s reaction to the news hadn’t occurred to him before now, only that Christina had a way of disappearing into dark corners until the absolute wrong moment, at all times.She traveled for her job, and sometimes he forgot that they were husband and wife, and not just apartment subletters who occasionally overlapped.

Except he never had to tell her, if he didn’t want to, because if there was one thing that Danny Castellano excelled at, it was pretending like everything was just as it should be.

He kissed her neck, breathing in the vanilla scent at her earlobe, and wondered how long he had exactly before she discovered all of his fraud.He tried surreptitiously checking the pile of mail for anything postmarked from State Medical Board, and coming up empty, sighed audibly.  


Christina didn’t look up from her baking.

They settled in bed that night, Danny staring at Christina’s moon-lit back, and the swath of blonde hair that she swept over her shoulder.He thought about pulling her toward him, and initiating sex, as if fucking his wife would be enough to sate the building worry that brewed inside of him.She snored softly, and Danny rolled over instead, facing the wall.

He eventually coaxed himself into a beleaguered sleep by playing a not-all-that-relaxing game of Counting the Lies You’ve Told, willing each one to sheepishly hop over a dilapidated fence in a far-off meadow.

* * *

It probably should have come as less of a surprise, then, a few weeks later, when he found Christina in bed with her co-worker.Danny’s competition wore coke-bottle black-rimmed glasses and a beard that seemed gratuitous, and was essentially the opposite of Danny in every way.

Danny knew that he wasn’t exactly winning Husband of the Year, but he definitely wasn’t a cheater.He wasn’t a cheater, but he was a guy who knew a guy, and Mr. Spindly Beard had better watch his back.And maybe he shouldn’t have shouted it, as Mr. Spindly Beard ran, pantsless, down their hallway, but it was the heat of the moment, after all.

“What are you doing?1?” Danny didn’t usually yell at Christina; he had a whole thing about raising his voice to women, but he was about to abandon that credo, because no woman had ever wronged him quite this badly.

It hadn’t seemed to him that this was even possible, although after a little consideration, maybe he should have seen it coming.Not that she’d given any hints or that he’d even felt the low rumble of the oncoming train wreck.He’d listened to so many fights between his parents in the years leading up to his father’s departure that it hadn’t occurred to Danny that never fighting could result in the exactly the same outcome; someone leaves, and someone else gets left.

She cried; he yelled; she yelled; he cried.It felt like his life was slowly leaking out of his reach, dwindling into remnants that he didn’t recognize, and he didn’t quite possess the energy to put them back together.

Christina’s belongings slowly receded into the background, like a dissolve in one of her photographs, until she finally blurred and disappeared altogether.She did him the favor of finishing her move when he was “at work”, which meant he only had to wander the city for a few hours instead of a complete eight that day.

The empty apartment he returned to seemed like exactly what he deserved.

  


* * *

And it wasn’t as if Stevie didn’t feel guilty about the mess he had helped Danny into; well, guilty enough for Stevie.To make it up to him, he had found another avenue for Danny to explore that could utilize some of his medical school training, and a lot of his patience.

  
Botox parties for rich Manhattanites were more common than Tupperware parties in the eighties, and powerful executives were always looking for ways to entertain their mistresses while they were forced to spend time with their wives.When Stevie called with the offer, he had sounded half embarrassed and almost equally proud.“It’s just a temporary thing.Just get you a little quick cash until we can make our next move.”

 

Now he was suddenly depending on Stevie for his income, instead of the other way around, and he had appearances to keep.He couldn’t suddenly stop paying his mother’s credit cards.He couldn’t suddenly sell his second apartment for the cash flow.Not with the divorce pending.

 

That desperation to maintain the status quo was pretty much exactly how Danny Castellano ended up at a penthouse apartment in Lenox Hill, 25 fresh vials of Botox chemical in his bag, his pride somewhere on East 72nd Street.

 

His head already hurt when the elevator doors opened into the apartment, probably from the way he’d been gritting his teeth in anticipatory dread.Danny heard her voice before he saw its source and once he actually located the woman making all the noise, he briefly wondered if he also needed a trip to the ophthalmologist.

 

She was wearing the brightest pink print blouse he had ever laid eyes on—were those giraffes?--layered under a creamsicle orange jumper and matching fuchsia pumps, and for a half second, he actually had to shield his eyes to look in her general direction.Her voice was straight out of a cartoon, high and bubbly and going on and on and on; he fingered the syringe in his pocket and wondered how much damage it could do to one of his ear drums.Who needed two?

 

Even her jewelry was loud: big orange and pink chrysalis dangled from her earlobes, and an inordinately chunky necklace adorned her neck.Upon further inspection, the print on her blouse was actually unicorns, which clearly placed her somewhere between the ages of 13 and 73, and possibly having had dressed in the dark.

 

Everyone in the apartment looked familiar, like he should have used a folded up copy of Page Six for identification purposes, and all the women were pulled far too tightly at their eyes and mouths, and made primarily of plastic and loose powder; their faces appearing on the verge of either freezing just the they were, or crumbling into dust on the extra plush carpeting.

 

Everyone, except for one.

 

The lighting was mostly dim, making the mask-like countenances appear even spookier, and lit from beneath, not unlike people telling scary stories around a campfire. Most of the conversations taking place were at a low murmur, nothing above a library or stage whisper, except for Rainbow Brite in the corner.She apparently never learned about inside voices, or blending in.

 

He looked down at his hands, realizing too late how the strap of his leather messenger bag dug into his flesh; the other, still wearing his wedding band.He quickly wriggled it off his ring finger, wedging it into one of the pockets of his bag.   He didn't need questions.  


 

A warm hand gripped his forearm, peachy polish on freshly buffed nails, and his stomach clenched when he noticed the unicorns merrily galloping up to her shoulder.He was already several zip codes outside of his comfort zone, he didn’t need _this_ too.“Monica Lewinsky, two o’clock.Wait.Ten o’clock.Crap.I never know if it’s stage left or actual…”

 

He pulled himself loose, involuntarily swiping his shirt sleeve across the bridge of his nose, not sure if his eyes were bleeding, or melting, or whatever side effect this nuclear explosion of a human being had on passersby.

 

“Which one is it?Ten or two?”

 

He didn’t know, or care, but if he answered, maybe she’d go away, and maybe, even better, she’d leave him alone for the rest of the afternoon.He could get it over with quickly, like ripping off a band aid.After being shot in the head.“It’s two o’clock.Definitely.”

 

She didn’t move.

 

“You know, I heard she’d be here, but I didn’t believe it.How could you walk around in public after being the face of semen for so many years?”

 

He couldn’t dignify that with a response if he wanted to.The face of semen?“Oh, you mean, the scandal.Yeah, it would be…hard.”He swallowed, surveying the woman’s creamy brown skin, and the sheath of jet black hair that fell to between her shoulder blades.He could smell the scent of her shampoo, something with juniper, and at least seventeen seconds passed where he considered burying his nose in it. _How long has it been since you’ve had sex?God, was it more than a month ago?_ Danny made a mental note to find some juniper lotion to aid in his masturbatory sensory experience, because something about that smell was really doing it for him.It had to be the smell, because it definitely wasn’t this girl.She was a nightmare.

 

“That’s what she said!”She guffawed, elbowing him in the rib cage, and Danny smiled tightly.“I’m Mindy, and you don’t belong here.”She looked him up and down, returning her hand to forearm and resuming her lock. “Oh, shit.You’re the Botox Doc.At first I thought you might have been Anderson Cooper’s latest boy toy, but he goes for…”

 

Danny shook his head.“No.Definitely not.”

 

“So, is that a hypodermic in your pocket or are you just happy to see me, Doc?”He could tell from the glint in her eye that there was more where that came from, and he couldn’t imagine a worse situation to be thrust in.Stevie was going to have to make this up to him in all kinds of ways, not the least of which would be monetarily.

 

Mindy’s grip moved from his arm to his hand, and he found himself being forcibly pulled into a room that had been set up as a makeshift salon.“I found you, so I get first dibs.”

 

He had no idea how any of this worked, only that he showed up, and if she had him, she had him.Running for the exit at this point would seem personal.He started unloading his supplies, organizing the syringes and small glass bottles while she watched.

 

“You still haven't told me your name, Doc.”

 

A hundred different names swam through his head, because he figured now was as good a time as any to cease and desist being Danny Castellano, but he couldn’t make up his mind quickly enough to lie.Plus, she had kind eyes; all wide and hugely brown, warm and open.“Danny Castellano.”He at least had the brains to say it fast and run it all together, so maybe she couldn’t pick him out of the phone book at a later date.

 

Although he didn’t know why he was assuming she’d be calling him.Or if people used phone books anymore.Sharing air with this Mindy person was making his brain malfunction, clearly.

 

He supposed they should consult, in some way, about what he was about to do to her face, but he had never done this before, and would have been more comfortable talking to her about her cervix, oddly enough.She looked like the type of person he could admit that to, because God knows she’d tell him something equally as horrifying, but instead, Danny flicked on the cosmetic light, peering at her face in as clinical a manner as possible.

 

“I’ve got this line,”She gestured at the bridge of her nose, the typical wrinkle caused by squinting, “And my crow’s feet are starting to look like my mother…and…”She caused her wrinkle to deepen as she gave Danny a stern look, “If you even try to tell me that I shouldn’t do this, because I’m pretty just the way I am… I can’t promise what I’ll do.”

 

She scared him, just a little, because he couldn’t promise that wasn’t what he _was_ thinking. But that thought had been secondary to the general sense of terror that he had no fucking clue what he was doing at the party, and there was going to come a point when women were actually lining up for him to perform miracles of the cosmetic variety.He kicked himself for not doing more than reading some old textbooks, and looking online for pointers.

 

She deepened her voice, imitating a male tone, “You’re a woman, you should look like a woman.”

 

“I didn’t say that.”

 

“But you were thinking it.”

 

“I don’t know what I’m thinking anymore, sweetheart.”He almost _couldn’t_ lie to her.

 

“You men are all the same.You tell us you like us without makeup, in a t-shirt, hair all windblown, and guess what?No guy has ever paid me any attention without my lip gloss on.Not one.”Mindy said.Her lip jutted out in a pout.

 

He scooted closer to her, rolling over on the stool, and held her face gently under the light.He didn’t see any wrinkles, anywhere, and he really didn’t want to do this to her, or to anyone.

  
“Maybe you’ve got some bum lip gloss.”

 

She narrowed her eyes at him, mock menacingly, which quickly turned back into that braying laugh he’d heard out in the party, “Quit making me laugh and botulize my face.”

 

He did as he was told.


	2. The Second C-Word

Danny’s small talk button had been out of service for years, if it ever functioned correctly at all, and he struggled to find words to talk to this Mindy person, who so trustingly settled under his bright white lights and sharp sterile objects. If he were her brother or her father, he’d have warned her against everything that was happening in the apartment at large, and especially about allowing him to do whatever he was about to do. She should have been demanding his credentials, or finding his rating on Healthgrade, at a bare minimum.

“So,” If he had had a list of suitable conversation topics in his pocket, he would have consulted it, “Who do you belong to?”

As he’d just paralyzed several of her muscle groups, Danny was forced to glean her mild perplexity by the dart of her brown eyes. “Oh, you mean, like how did I get invited?”

“Yes. That would have been a much less embarrassing way to phrase it.” He rolled away on his stool, wiping his newly sweating palms on the tops of his thighs.

“We’re two of a kind, Castellano. I’m the other entertainment.” _Holy shit. She’s a stripper._ “I’m the aesthetician. I’m going to airbrush them into oblivion and then give them gel manicures after you’ve stabbed in them in the face, in an effort to dull both the emotional and physical pain.”

“Okay, calm down. No one is getting stabbed in the face.”

She couldn’t raise her eyebrow, so she raised her index finger instead. “I beg to differ. But whatever helps you sleep at night.” She examined her reflection in the mirror, surveying his handiwork. He had to admit, he didn’t do a terrible job. Granted, she looked a little….surprised. But that would fade with time. Hopefully.

“I used to run my own salon, but there were some…events, and now I’m doing parties mostly, and some consulting. Lahiri of the Party, get it?”

From his blank expression, Mindy continued.

“’Cause Lahiri’s my last name, and I’m the life of the…”  She did jazz hands to indicate _party._

“Oh, right.” This was more conversation than he’d planned to have, and he couldn’t foresee a suitable conclusion. Danny did a quick inventory of the room and the window looked too high to jump out of without major injury. “So, nice to meet you then, and I’ll just…”

“Very funny, Danny, you’re stuck with me for the evening. It’s you and me, partners in crime. Or the beautification of rich bitches. Whichever.” She started unloading her own supplies out of a giant train case. He’d never seen so many pots and jars and brushes, and she seemed to have some system for it all, though he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. “You know, I was going to go to med school too.”

How he could have known, from the fifteen minutes he’d known her, was unclear. Maybe she had sent instructions and autobiographies ahead of time.  “I wanted to be a gynecologist…but,” She brushed a bit of loose powder off of the counter, and the air around her table glittered briefly, “My parents were killed in a car crash when I was in college, and I had to take care of my little brother, and the only other thing I had ever taken care of was a parakeet. It did not go well. So I made Rishi my priority, and went to cosmetology school at night, and viola. The glamorous world of Makeover Parties for Manhattan Mistresses.”

“Sounds…I’m sorry about your parents.”

She didn’t meet his eyes. “Hey, it was a long time ago. We all do what we need to, you know?” Her face was obscured by the shadow of her dark hair, and her eyes seemed watery with tears. She picked up a brush and swirled in it her hands, making a tinny clicking sound against her many rings. “What made you pick dermatology?”

“I guess you could say that dermatology picked me.” It wasn’t a lie. For some reason, he wanted to keep his untruths to a minimum around this girl. Maybe because she seemed like exactly the type capable of unravelling them.

“Someone has to handle the moles and warts and melanoma, right?” She stood up, then, her ensemble more striking in color and richness in the white room, “We had a saying at my old spa: You massage my back, I’ll massage yours.” Danny rolled his eyes. “Come on, let me doing something for you.”

Before he could object, or run, or scream, he found himself pinned to the stool he’d been sitting on by a well-placed knee; Mindy’s breasts inches from his face as she leaned over to find the proper tool or product. He could smell the juniper of her hair again, and her skin was warm where she gripped his chin after she’d made her selection.

He held his breath.

“I’m just going to use a little liner, and a smidge of…” She pursed her lips, her eyes holding a focused expression he recognized from hundreds of hours spent in operating rooms—the concentration, the attention to detail.

He closed his eyes in an effort to erase the nostalgia of feeling that power again; when he could actually fix another human being.

Mindy stood back to admire her work. “Oh my God. I just made your eyes totally pop. You. Are. Welcome.”

If Danny had to recreate the chain of events that resulted in his wearing guy liner and mascara in the middle of a stranger’s penthouse apartment, he would never have been able to, not without heavy hypnosis or some kind of regression therapy. Later, he would swear that large chunks of time were missing, as if he’d suffered a concussion, or been heavily medicated.

She shoved the mirror into his face, and hell if his eyes weren’t popping. He also looked a little like his mother, and a lot like he was just short the feather boa and leather pants to make it a complete look.

“Don’t worry, I do it to my boyfriend all the time, and he’s very manly. And tall. He’s British.” She seemed inordinately proud of this fact, like she was hosting a new foreign exchange boyfriend program, or an exhibit at Epcot. She seemed like she half expected him to congratulate  her.   “You can totally carry it off.”

He very much doubted it, and she didn’t even wait for a response before she headed back into the living room.

Something was happening to his life that he didn’t recognize, and in an effort gather some semblance of normalcy, Danny found himself sneaking out through the servants’ entrance while Mindy claimed her next victim.

 

* * *

 

There was a peacock in his hallway.

An electric blue unblinking eyelid peered back at him, as he stood in his bare feet, propelled out of a coma- like sleep by a harsh and prolonged pounding at his front door.

Okay, fine, she looked like a peacock through the peephole, and he couldn’t place her face exactly, because his brain didn’t turn on earlier than seven a.m. anymore. Once he got out of the habit of sleeping on his feet for middle of the night deliveries, he couldn’t really orient himself quickly enough. He had a hundred questions, all along the same lines: “How the hell did you find me?”

“Ever heard of a phone book, weirdo?”

Shit. They did still make them.

“Did you know there are six other Danny Castellanos in the Tri-State area? One of them was even listed as a partner at an OB-GYN practice, but clearly, that wasn’t you.”

“No, of course not.” He stared down at his big toe, hoping that she didn’t pry any further than that.

She produced his worn messenger bag, the strap looped around her fingers, from behind her back, “In your haste to flee, Cinderella, you left your glass slipper at the ball. Seriously, what was with the Irish goodbye last night? One minute you were there, and the next you were all, Deuces!”

He hastily grabbed his bag, and tossed it onto a nearby chair. “I had a work emergency.”

Mindy pushed her way into the apartment, not requiring an invitation, forcing Danny to jam his lower back into the table by the door. “You look like the emo version of Burger King right now. Do you need a second?”

In addition to what were apparently now permanent raccoon eyes, his hair stuck out in clearly defined and pointed tufts, as if he’d been yanking on his own hair in an exasperated fit.

He shook his head. What did he need to gussy himself up for at this point? He hadn’t shown up at _her_ door unannounced. He made a grand flourish with his hand, and he could have sworn she almost curtsied. “Thanks for the bag, I appreciate you getting it back to me, and….”

“That’s not the only reason I stopped by, Danny. I have a business proposition for you.”  Because women from strange parties always showed up at his door offering him jobs.

“I’m not looking for work.”

“Be that as it may, my boyfriend is getting a job together, and it’s kind of a doozy. He needs somebody smart, who can keep a secret. Plus, it doesn’t hurt to have a doctor in the house.” It was entirely possible that those were the only details she knew, because she didn’t seem likely to be much of a vault of secret keeping. If anything, she probably let secrets go fairly easily, collections of helium balloons released swiftly into windy afternoons.

“I’m busy.”

“You look busy.” She surveyed the austere surroundings of his apartment, his inability to allow a single item out of place apparent. “How do you live here? Really live? Like, without a coaster?”

“It’s six in the morning! I’m sorry I’m not playing Parcheesi with the neighbors to entertain you, but I sleep. Sorry about your luck, sister.”

“Listen, I can’t take you seriously right now, I want to bring you my huddled masses.”

She was unnerving and disarming enough as it was, just from her presentation, and the sheer amount of so many colors and patterns and shapes and swirls, and something about her smile made him wonder if there wasn’t something more underneath all of it. But it was too early in the morning, and he didn’t have enough wits about him to refuse everything about what she offered.

“Can I ask you one thing, though?”

“I don’t know that I have a choice in the matter.”

“True.” She had a way of making a truly excruciating amount of eye contact, and it seemed like the only defense he had against it was to stare right back. “I swear, I was just trying to find an address or a phone number in there, but…are you married, Danny?”

“No.” He hoped he hadn’t flinched. _Stupid ring he’d put in the stupid pocket at the stupid party. Stupid stupid stupid._

“I like how you’re a man of few words, I totally get it. But if we’re going to be friends, you’re going to have to help me out a little.”

“We’re not going to be friends.”

She smiled, licking her lips. “I doubt that.”

“What is it that you’re doing here again? Making friends?”

“No, I’m making you rich. And not doctor rich. Keanu Reeves after _The Matrix_ , give your money to pigeons rich.”

“I’m not getting involved in some Mary Kay cosmetics Ponzi scheme.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Just meet me here,” She thrust a glittery pink nail polish bottle shaped business card under his nose. It somehow managed to be bubblegum scented. “At six p.m. tonight. I’ll introduce you to everyone, and you can make your final decision. And wash your face, weirdo.”

She was down the hallway before he could fire off a fitting a retort, and for half a second, he thought maybe he could hear her out. What else did he have to lose?

Except, when six o’clock came, and went, and Danny didn’t move from his couch. _Slap Shot_ was on cable, and he’d have had to put on a shirt, and pants, and shoes, and only maybe one of those seemed doable. He’d have to get Keanu Reeves rich some other time.

* * *

 

His mother whispered a second _c-word_ to Danny a few weeks later, after Sunday Mass and a plate of sauce so rich he could barely keep his eyes open at the dinner table. He sat up straight then, as if Sister Carmella had rapped on his desk with her ruler, his heart dropping directly into his shoes.

“It’s okay, Danny. Dr. King says that it’s very treatable, and she doesn’t think it spread, and the surgery will…”

It was a tiny spot on her right ovary, a stromal tumor, and though it was only a few millimeters in size, it was able to recalibrate Danny’s entire life in eight seconds flat. He couldn’t take a breath without thinking _cancer_ , and every repercussion that came with it, not the least of which was that he wasn’t going to able to do anything about it.

He took a “leave of absence” to shuttle his mother to appointments, and hold her hand when Dr. King recited statistics and numbers and used terms far too scientific for his sixty three year old mother to understand, and he wondered if he had talked the same way to patients and their sons, and if he could go back, and change it somehow.

She had the surgery on a Tuesday afternoon, and afterward, he kissed her hello, and told her that the surgeon had removed all of the tumor, and everything looked great (because that was always what people said, _It looks great_ , because the alternative was, _We just ripped a fuzzy blob of cancerous cells out of your body and they might very well return_ , and that just seemed too foreboding for “good news.”)

By late Tuesday evening, he was standing in front of a salon and spa storefront, somewhere deep in Chelsea, knocking on the locked door that most likely led to the apartment over the shop.

The door flung inward, and Mindy appeared in the dim light of the stairway. She was wearing stretchy black yoga pants and a baggy t-shirt, and not a stitch of make-up. Her face broke wide open with a smile. “Danny.”

He punched his hands deeper into his pockets and bounced forward on the balls of his feet. “If it’s not too late, I’m all in. Let’s light ‘em up. Or whatever you people say.”

She laughed, her eyes crinkling. “I don’t think we say that, whoever my people are. But I’m glad you’re here. Finally. We’ve been arguing…is this our lair or our hideout? It’s been all ' _No it’s a hideout, no, it’s a lair; lair, hideout, hideout, lair_.'” She bobbed her head with each volley, as if she was watching a tennis match.

“It’s been a trying time, I can imagine.”

“So hard. Totally a downer. We could barely get any of our planning done. And there are so many details. Jeremy even made a Power Point.” She grabbed his hand, pulling him up the steps. “Everyone just left, but I’ll get you caught up.”

Danny sighed, resigning himself to the choices he was forcing himself to make.  He had to be able to take care of his family; this was just a means to an end.

 

Even after the PowerPoint, and the music video, and three different dioramas with Lego mini-figure stand-ins to demonstrate The Plan, Danny couldn’t quite will himself out of Mindy’s apartment. He pretended to want to help her clean up, but he was really just avoiding having to go back to his empty apartment, and actually have to think about what he was about to do.

As if she was standing inside his head, Mindy looked up from the dishes, “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Theoretically?” Technically, he was directly stealing from Butch Cassidy, but she gave him the opening. “Not even a little bit.”

She turned off the faucet and turned back to her refrigerator, grabbing two beers and a bottle opener. “Follow me.”

She led him through her closet, where Danny side stepped articles of clothing that seemed to have had their occupants disappear into thin air, landing haphazardly on the floor. She hoisted open the window and settled onto the balcony that overlooked the city, gesturing for him to join her.

They sat side by side, legs crossed; watching the lights of traffic and listening to one of her neighbors practice the trombone, terribly.

“So what made you finally show up? Was it this,” she pointed at her ring finger, “Or this?” She performed an elaborate series of pantomimes that he could not even begin to decipher, but may have involved him having to either steal home or bunt.

“Neither.”

“I know that you just got divorced. And that you aren’t really a dermatologist. And that you did really used to be a gynecologist.”

“It’s a long story.”

She took a gulp of her beer, some of her hair escaping her ponytail, giving him the forcible eye contact again.  He didn't look away.  “I’ve got nothing but time.”

He’d have been lying if he said he didn’t want to lay it all at her feet, all the ways that he didn’t understand how he’d gotten to this point, and how someone who practically color coded and filed away his entire life could have possibly ended up doing the opposite of everything that he thought he knew or believed in.   He came as close as opening his mouth, but the words never came out.

Instead, Danny rolled the glass bottle between his palms, letting the sticky summer air cling to his silence for a few minutes until he clambered to his feet, reaching down for her empty beer. “Let me get you another one.”

His mom had always told him that it was better to tell his secrets to someone he disliked, because it wouldn’t matter what they thought of him. And he wondered what it might have meant, that he couldn’t tell Mindy.


	3. More Like The Mild Bunch

Danny woke up with his tongue thick and his brain hairy--the after effects of smoking too many cigarettes heaped on top of too many beers--and apparently, hadn’t even been able to suffer the consequences alone in his own apartment.  


 

More than a few minutes passed as Danny slowly collected shreds of evidence to deduce that he’d fallen asleep in Mindy’s overstuffed closet, hugging a tufted collection of her loudly printed blouses as a pillow.His own shirt hung from his left wrist, as if he had forgotten that he was in process of removing it when he fell asleep (or more accurately, passed out).The fuzzy blanket he recognized from Mindy’s sofa covered him up to his chest, and he was in his stocking feet, his boots carefully placed near the closet door.  


 

He knew he was confused, or deeply addled from his hangover, because he was fairly certain that what he remembered about the previous night (not to mention early morning) was having laughed for the majority of it.That couldn’t have been right.

 

Danny laced up his shoes, his head still gauzy and strange, but nothing a cup of coffee, a hot shower--and maybe a couple of slices--couldn’t cure.  


 

Mindy accosted him before he had the door fully open, a mug of coffee already in her hand.She was fully dressed, in some sort of plaid and heart shaped permutation, and it did nothing to stunt the sharpness of the ache in his head.  


 

“Rise and shine, up and at ‘em.”She thrust the ceramic cup, emblazoned with the glittery bust of some singer he never listened to, into his chest. “We’ve got a full day ahead of us.Jeremy wants to meet you, I need to drop off some supplies to Beverly, and Morgan has texted me three times in the last hour to see what size baseball hat you wear.You can’t just sleep the day away.”She knocked into him with her hip, forcing him off-kilter, and padded back into her kitchen. “Plus we have a lair to prepare.”

 

“Hideout.We have a hideout to prepare.We’re not super villains.”Danny followed behind his newfound accomplice-- _why did everyone always want to rush to define everything all the time, anyway?_ —oddly ready to take part in whatever errand running she wanted to do for the day.

 

* * *

If this was his new normal, the kind of thing he’d read about in all his _After Your Divorce_ books, he was going to have to find a way to embrace it.He was supposed to set his alarm and find a place to go, even if that place was a fake spa-slash-hole in the wall hideout.  


 

Now, he just had to figure out how he was really going to rob a bank.

 

* * *

“You can’t just walk into a vestibule, wave a gun and expect cash to jump into your pockets.It takes work.It takes effort.It takes elbow grease.”He punched the air on _elbow_ and Mindy gave him an exaggerated side eye glance.

 

“Oh, stop lecturing me, old man.” Mindy pouted, tossing her copy of _Vogue_ onto the coffee table.“And stop acting like our plan isn’t foolproof.I showed you the dioramas.Twice.Jeremy got a good tip that FIDO is depositing a ton of cash at banks across the city and we’re going to help intercept it.Easy peasy.”

 

There were a few things wrong about that interpretation of The Plan as he knew it (dioramas and Lego figures notwithstanding), not the least of which, “FIDO?”

 

“FIFI?”  


 

Danny sighed.“It’s FIFA, Mindy, not FIFI, or FIDO, or FICA.”He’d already heard her butcher the acronym about six hundred times just that afternoon.Not coincidentally, he had also stopped being patient with her around the third bungling of the name, so it had been a bit of a trying time in their nascent relationship.

 

“I knew it was some kind of dog breed.”Danny opened his mouth to object, but she held up a hand to stop him.“Seriously, I cannot hear you say _We can’t just rob a bank willy nilly_ one more time.You’re such a stress ball.”

 

“Have you done the research?Have you seen the numbers?”Danny rifled through the stack of articles he’d printed before Mindy slammed his laptop shut, shouting about browser histories.“The average sentence doubles with armed robberies.32 years in jail.You ready for that?”

 

“Aww, you and Killer are going to be so happy together.”

 

“Shut up.”He growled at her.  


 

“You shouldn’t tell girls to shut up.It’s rude.And I don’t want to go to jail either, you know.Because I’ve seen _Orange is the New Black_ , and there isn’t an Indian tribe…”She paused, finally hearing how something that emerged from her own mouth sounded to others, “And anyway, I’m just not so sure that reading _Bank Robberies for Dummies_ is the way to go.”

 

“Someone around here needs to be prepared for all the possibilities.”Danny gestured to the room that only he and Mindy occupied.  


 

For reasons undetermined, Danny had barely even glimpsed the rest of the team he’d be working with, only that Jeremy had insisted familiarity could only breed contempt, and could Danny just sign _here, here, here_ and _here_ on these waivers?

 

“Come on.We just watched that training thing on YouTube last night,” Mindy whined.

 

“That was the Beastie Boy’s _Sabotage_ video.”

 

“We can study tomorrow.Let’s take a night off, relax.”He knew that he didn’t have to remind her that they’d done nothing but relax since that first night, and _relaxed_ wasn’t really a setting on his emotional dial.The closest he could get to relaxed was probably moderately anxious.

 

“Mindy.”

 

“Okay, fine.”The handgun that Jeremy had bought for her, a 9 millimeter, rested on the table, and Mindy snatched it up, “I’ll learn to use your stupid gun.”  


 

Danny ducked as she waved the barrel in his general direction, and swiftly but gently removed it from her hand.

 

“Let’s start slowly,” he eyed the safety-locked trigger, “Safety first.”

 

“Safety schmafety.Let’s shoot shit.” Mindy nudged him off the couch and prodded him into the back room.It was far enough from the street for the sound not to raise any eyebrows, and there was enough space to set up the target that Danny had printed from the internet (again to Mindy’s chagrin).Danny guessed the neighborhood was fairly accustomed to loud noises coming from Mindy’s general direction.

  
“All right, Dirty Harry, show me your ways.”Mindy rubbed the hilt of the gun suggestively.

 

“First of all, it’s not a toy.And we’re not in some stupid movie.So wipe that goofy smile off your face.”

 

“Did you just call _Dirty Harry_ a stupid movie?I don’t know who you are anymore, Danny, geez.”

 

“I didn’t mean…”Danny mentally crossed himself, _Clint Eastwood, pray for us,_ “Just take this seriously is all.You could get hurt.”Mindy gazed down the barrel of the gun, transfixed, and Danny guided her hand to change positions, causing her to then point it at his mid-section, “More importantly, I could get hurt.”  


 

Danny centered Mindy in front of the target, surrounding her arms with his own as she aimed.“First, you want to take notice of the grip…”He adjusted his hold; his nose pressed into the familiar juniper scent of her hair, and dropped his left hand to hover on the crest of her hipbone.  


 

She was bratty, and brash, and she never stopped moving.She spouted contradictory political beliefs and talked about murder and celebrities _a lot_.She never even attempted to wait her turn.Danny could count on the hand of his mom’s childhood friend, Mikey Three Fingers, how many things he actually had in common with her, but something about the smell of her hair always drove him a little bit out of his mind.

 

“How do you know if it’s turned on?”

 

Danny knew he didn’t have enough blood flowing to his head.

  
“Oh, you’ll kno---“  


 

The cologne entered before Jeremy, and Mindy practically tossed the gun over his head to run to her boyfriend.“There’s Mr. Gorgeous!Hey, Danny, look what I did last night!”  


 

Danny looked away quickly as she commenced what appeared to be vigorous licking and kneading of various parts of Jeremy’s body, and he surmised that any attention of hers would now be turned to activities that he would not be participating in.No matter how many times Jeremy seemed to suggest it.

 

“Ah, Mindy.So hot I should phone the fire brigade.”Jeremy murmured into her neck, and Danny felt something clench in his stomach.Probably his lunch, threatening a return.

 

Mindy smiled, one with all her teeth, and Danny wanted to make a biting remark about how some species would consider her expression a form of aggression, “I never know what he’s saying half the time, and he speaks English!”

 

He muttered something unintelligible, even to himself, and turned back to his pile of informational literature while Mindy and Jeremy continued fondling one another only inches away.

 

“This is unprofessional.”Danny finally announced, slamming his fist on the top of his thigh and causing Mindy to jolt in her seat.  He felt somewhat vindicated as she unwound herself from the lanky Englishman.

 

“We aren’t working.”Jeremy raised an eyebrow.He was smug, and far too tan for someone who originated from a country with so little sunlight.  


 

“It is a bank job, isn’t it?”Danny knew himself well enough to know that he wasn’t making a joke.He wasn’t sure where this guy got off, thinking that he didn’t have to raise a finger and everyone would just want to jump to his attention.Except right now, that was exactly how things were working.

 

Mindy threw a smooth, dark leg over one of Jeremy’s knees. A tiny hint of thigh peeked out from her skirt, and Danny felt an odd tugging in his groin, “Oh, sweet hairy Danny.You know so little.Jeremy is working.Hard.He’s been working his angle for weeks in preparation for the Big Day.”

 

“Listen, you can’t just flirt and and.. and… British your way through this and expect that everything will just work out.”

 

Jeremy smiled, giving Mindy’s arm a squeeze, “Well, considering my portion of the plan is romancing the innocent bank teller for intel and schedules,”Danny winced involuntarily at his pronunciation, “I should very well hope I can flirt my way through this.And I will British as I please.”  


 

“Look, I’m not trying to tell you how to run your...business, as it were.But we’re not ready.Beverly was still making pantyhose the last we talked to her.And I still don’t know what those are FOR.”

 

“Daniel, you mustn’t fret.I have it all under control.I’ll be the brains, you be the man who fits inside the rubbish bin.”

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

 

 

Danny struggled with the straps and Velcro and positioning of his Kevlar vest-- _what was this thing, a straight jacket_?—and the material managed to scratch at his skin, even through his black t-shirt.  He was always the kid who had to have the seams of his socks exactly right (straight over the toe; none of that wonky cock-eyed stuff) and Danny resisted an urge to claw at his torso in an effort to soothe the tactile stress. 

  
  


“Good God, you’re helpless.”  Mindy gripped her rubber Ronald Reagan mask (the mask that they’d told her over and over was completely unnecessary, since they were trying to blend in, not re-enact select scenes from _Point Break_ ) between her knees in order to free up her hands, and Danny dropped his own listlessly to his sides while she worked.  Sunlight glinted off the glossy strands of hair she had pulled back into a tight bun.   Mindy deftly fastened the last strap of his vest and gave him a little reassuring pat, as if he had just passed safety inspection.  “Be careful, okay?”  

Something about her pat loosened the coiled helix of peculiar emotion that had recently taken up residence in his chest; an emotion that he could never quite name or manage.  He only knew that after today, Mindy would slip out of his life just as she had slipped in, and he wasn’t sure that he was as prepared for that as he’d thought he’d be.  

Especially since the moment he realized that his enjoyment at watching her leave a room was not at all related to her absence.

She grinned, that knowing little smile that somehow managed to seem just for him, and situated her Reagan mask back atop her head.  She was dressed in all black; soft clothes that clung to her curves, accentuating everything that was warm and welcoming about her body, everything that he’d been pretending not to notice for the last little while.  The outfit actually made her stand out more, rather than the intended effect, and she seemed brighter and more precisely Mindy in the absence of color than she ever had in the never-ending swirl of patterns she usually wore.

  
  


“Hey.”   Danny stepped forward, and knocking the disembodied head of a former president to the ground, cupped her face in his hands.  

The surprise registered in her brown eyes as he closed the space between them, and while the alley behind the Sun Trust Bank seemed like exactly the wrong location to kiss Mindy Lahiri for the first time, he decided to do it anyway. 

She pulled back slowly, her breathing ragged, “What did you do that for?”  Her fingers were warm where they still tangled in his protective gear.

He’d read once that when human beings saw something beautiful, their first instinct was to eat it.

And he was fairly certain that he didn’t want to eat Mindy, but he had definitely wanted to devour her.  He needed to lick the corded muscle that ran from her clavicle to the underside of her jaw and savor the saltiness of her skin. He had wanted to search her mouth with his tongue, and finally discover how she managed to always have that bit of sweetness on her breath, the same sweetness that made him nostalgic for penny candies he used to palm from the five and dime on the corner near his house growing up.  She was home and comfort and ritual and mystery, and if he didn’t at least try, he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to forgive himself.

“I just wanted to see what it felt like.”

Never taking her eyes off his mouth, “What did you think?”

“I made the right choice.”

Later, he’d watch himself kissing her in the news footage; grainy film of a familiar curve of hips, his dark head lowering and skimming her neck, and back up to her mouth. He was never not surprised by the seemingly violent manner in which he clutched at her ass, something he didn't even remember doing at the time.    

The tabloid news shows would label them the Kissing Bandits; Danny’s New York State Driver’s License photo forever super imposed over the image of his lips meeting Mindy's for the first time, and the galaxies of his brain exploding.


	4. Runaway American Dream

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath

 

  _Let’s rob a bank, she said.  It will be fun, she said.  We’ll be rich! _

 

 

Danny spent more than a few hours crouched in the shaded concrete peninsula—a long abandoned crater tucked near an office building, though not nearly far enough from the Sun Trust Bank to be truly safe—while the sounds of sirens closed in around him.

Awash in the sour crests of guilt and shame and remorse that rippled through his gut **,** Danny helplessly heaved the contents of his stomach into the damp corner of his hiding space.  

He knew it was his entirely his fault.They all could have been halfway to Canada if he hadn’t--

Everything had been going according to plan.  Jeremy was in place with Betsy, the naïve and trusting bank teller.Morgan was waiting in the car.Beverly was doing…whatever the hell Beverly did.Danny had been safely tucked into the—Jesus Harold Christ—rubbish bin when he’d heard Mindy’s incredulous voice breaking through the muffled silence.

“Who invited the witches?”  

And that sentence, for all that it was worth, was the beginning of the end of Danny Castellano’s bank robbing career.

The news outlets had it all wrong.It wasn’t surprising, considering Danny had been railing against the lack of reliability in media for years, and of course he’d be the victim of shoddy reporting and unreliable sources.Ironically, the cable show that mocked the news was the only one that even came close to correctly representing how everything had actually gone down, and that really made his blood boil.  If he had to be the laughing stock of combination bank robbers/unlicensed physicians (which to his credit, was a niche group), he requested that a reputable news source offer the most accurate account. Couldn’t it be someone with the gravitas of Mike Wallace, God rest his soul, stating the facts in a resolute and highly competent manner, if his mother’s heart was going to have to shatter into a million pieces at his ineptitude?

Somehow Stevie had always known that one of them would need a quick way to disappear, and after three harrowing bus rides and a change of clothes, Danny found himself in his own version of solitary confinement.

*****

Beads of sweat dropped onto the bare wood floor of the cabin as Danny completed his three hundredth push-up, a method Danny found most effective for managing most anything:heartbreak, self-loathing, glaring stupidity, and most importantly, penitence. His concentration was jarred by an insistent pounding at his door, and he braced himself for the accompanying battering ram and SWAT team and semi-automatic weapons pointed directly at his face.  But the door didn’t fly off its hinges, or swing open in a hail of gun fire.  “Danny.  Please.  It’s me.”  The voice was small, but bright, and wholly recognizable.

“Mindy.  What the hell are you doing here?”  Unlocking the door and yanking her into the cabin by the crook of her elbow, he did a cursory check of the perimeter.  She was dressed casually, in a tunic and black leggings, color-blocked but not obnoxiously so.  Her hair was shoulder-length, with a shock of brilliant pink, which Danny assumed was her version of a disguise.Mindy threw her arms around his neck in a hug, and his shoulders stiffened when the roundness of her belly glided against his.  

Mindy stepped back, and posed with her arm around her swollen abdomen.  “I see you’ve been introduced to my Immaculate Conception.  It’s a real conversation piece, I’ll tell you.”

His brain swam with possibilities and timelines, and then he remembered that he’d never had sex with this woman.  Bullet dodged.How was she possibly this pregnant?  That English bastard’s guys could swim?  Stupid Limey sonofa---“Congratulations?”

She pouted, “That didn’t sound even a little sincere, Danny.”

“Sorry, the cake I ordered hasn’t arrived yet.”  He had also forgotten how quickly she could irritate him.  Under fifty seconds this time.  “You’re pregnant?”

“I know this comes as a shock to you, but I really hope that you’ll help me raise them as your own children.”

“Twins?”  His voice choked and twisted in his throat.

Mindy laughed, “Oh my God, Danny, you should see your face right now.  I’m sorry; I can’t do this to you.”  With a loud ripping noise, she reached under her shirt and pulled out a flesh colored padded belt, her stomach mercifully flat again.  “I think we should name him Dolla Dolla Bill, y’all.”

Nothing made sense, and Danny wondered if he wasn’t having a stroke.   It wasn’t until Mindy unzipped the padding to reveal wads and wads of cash inside that he understood much of anything.  “Holy fuck.”

“I’ve always wanted to make it rain.”  Mindy clutched at a handful of bills.

He slapped at her wrist.  “That money is filthy.  You’ll get hepatitis.”

“Fine, Dr. Doom, I’ll wash it and then roll in it.”  She paused, screwing her face into a question mark, “Is that why they call it money laundering?”

Danny wasn’t sure if the inquiry required a response, but his skills of self-preservation didn't include patience for everlasting nonsense.  “Wait.  How did you even know where to find me?” 

She looked down sheepishly.  “I might have installed an app on the burn phones that intercepted all your text messages, and I knew that Stevie told you about this place…”

“You didn’t…you’re going to get us both caught.”  If he wasn’t so relieved to see another human, even if it was THIS particular human, he probably would have shoved her back into the woods.   “I don’t understand.  Why did you even come back?” 

“I just didn’t want you to be by yourself, Danny.”

By himself was probably his best-case scenario in this situation.If he had been by himself, maybe it would have kept him from committing a felony with a bunch of societal rejects.If he’d been by himself, that would have meant he’d never heard Beverly’s story about the threesome she’d had with Ronald and Nancy Reagan during a _Just Say No_ benefit.He could still hear the growl in her voice when she’d just said, “Yes.” 

Danny rocked forward on the balls of his feet.“I’m fine.I’ll figure something out.”

“Yeah, you’re great. I can tell by all your self-flagellation.”She gestured at his sweat-stained t-shirt, “It’s all over the news…I don’t know. I was driving, top down, blasting Queen Bey, and your big dumb Italian face kept popping up everywhere.  On the numbers at the gas pump, the billboards, the GPS.  And when I ignored all of those, your gravelly voice started invading my brain. _Come back, Mindy, I’m gonna die alone, Mindy--”_

__

He tried (and failed) not to take offense that her impression of him most closely resembled a frog with a speech impediment. “I would never say that.”

Mindy strolled through the front room, inspecting the book shelves and surveying the furnishings.  “By the way, even your voice in my head is super judge-y.  So I turned around and here I am.”She arrived in Danny’s bedroom, after about twelve full steps, and sat on the edge of the bed, stuffing some of the cash back into her giant handbag.“If I didn’t come back, you were going to turn yourself in, and take the fall, and…”

_She'd intercepted those text messages too, apparently._ “It’s okay.  I can take it.”

“It’s not okay, Danny.  First of all, you’re too small to go to prison.  Pocket sized people don’t do well in the joint.”

“Okay.  That’s enough.”He held up a finger, like that would do anything to stop the deluge of Mindy-isms from raining down upon him.

“And second, you’re a good guy.  You don’t need to go down for all of us.You were just trying to help your family.”

His stomach twisted at the mention.  Intentions aside, he was still the one that froze to his spot, and caused Jeremy’s arrest.“You still shouldn’t have done that.  It’s going to be hard enough to keep myself safe.  I don’t know if I can do it for both us.”

“Well, I have thirty million dollars that says you can,” Mindy said, her face brightening.

People had always described surprise as some physiological response, and in that moment, Danny actually felt his duodenum bounce off his patella.  “Wha--”

“You’re welcome.”She smiled.

“For what?”

“For coming to pick you up.  Now pack up your crap and let’s go.  We’ve gotta be three states over if you don’t want Morgan to find us before the cops do.”

“Morgan?”

“You don’t know?  Since Jeremy’s awaiting trial and appears to be singing like a canary, Morgan’s new job is to bring you in.  Dead or alive.”She mimicked a throat slicing motion and an accompanying sound effect.

“Fantastic.”

“He thinks he’s Dog the Bounty Hunter.  It’s ridiculous.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”  Danny scratched at the back of his neck, attempting to weigh what option seemed closer to impending doom:  running FROM a now duty-bound Morgan, or running WITH any version of Mindy.

“He actually named his dog The Bounty Hunter, is what I’m saying.”

“I get it.  We’ve got to go.”

“You catch on so fast!I’ll tell you the rest of the plan in the car.”  She pinched his ass playfully.  “Now scoot!”  

* * *

 

Danny’s eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight at a rate equal to that of his brain’s ability to process the scene in front of him.

“This car… has… a…mustache.”  He said slowly and with great effort, his words dragging through the molasses of his astonishment.

Mindy’s lips formed a little bow as she began to argue, “But that’s the trademark of Ube—“

“You used an app?!?! For our getaway getaway car?”  It was the crime spree equivalent of a second honeymoon.  The same butterflies, the same adrenaline rush, the same desire to murder your partner for making the first of many ridiculous decisions.  “Damnit, Mindy.”

“Order your own getaway vehicle next time.”  She sulked.  “And anyway, I bought a fleet of them, in a few cities, so that we can switch them out if we need to.  I’m only trying to help.”

“Does the mustache come off?”  It was pink, for Chrissake.  He wouldn’t have been surprised if circus theme music played and clowns had climbed out of its trunk.   Danny leaned against the back passenger door.  “What is our plan here, exactly?”  Because after becoming the proud owner of several cars that most closely resembled Tom Selleck, he wasn’t sure if he should trust all the logistics to his partner in crime anymore.

“First of all,” She dug into her purse dropping candy wrappers, receipts and three different kinds of lip gloss onto the mossy ground.She also produced her nine millimeter, which she set gingerly on the hood of the car.“You like my sweetheart grip?I found this post online, about what gangsters used to do—and what are we if not gangsters, right?”

“It was actually GIs, during the war—“

“I saw it on Tumblr, Danny, it was gangsters.”

“Yeah, nothing on the Internet is ever wrong, Mindy.Right.”Danny attempted to push the kernel of niggling disappointment back down his own gullet by swallowing noisily, and turning the weapon so that Jeremy’s giant face was staring at the windshield, and not into his soul.Or thereabouts.

“We needed new identities.Meet Chloe Silverado,” She preened, punctuating her movements with a little dance, “And Arthur Fonzarelli.”Mindy slammed a plastic laminated card and passport folder into his chest, and Danny had to take a step backward from the sheer force.

“You named me after the Fonz?” Danny was pretty sure that the mechanical hum he heard in his ears was actually his brain shutting down. **  
**

“It was the only Italian name I could think of besides that Mussolini guy or Charles Brando.”

“That isn't…Actually, Charles Brando wouldn’t have been the worst name in the…Fonzie?Really?”

She blinked at him slowly, as if he was the one with a screw loose.“I thought that we should drive to Canada, since we’re so close, but then I remembered.They know me there.”Her tone had a cadence that he couldn’t quite identify, but it seemed ominous, so he let her press on, “You speak Spanish, right?” 

He shook his head.

“And I’m on the No Fly list,” Mindy trailed one foot along the pavement bashfully.

“Go figure.”He crossed his arms against his chest.He had some thoughts about what could have landed her there, but he would have laid odds on it involving the words _flight of destiny._

“Which is why I also bought us a boat.”

“Oh boy.”Danny groaned.

“You’ll love it! The guy I bought it off of named it _The Forgetaboatit_!  It reminded me of you.  Don’t ask me why.”

“That seems vaguely racist, but go on.”

“And then I found a tiny island—“

“If it has a stupid name too, I’m slitting my wrists with the car antenna.”  

“It’s so exclusive it doesn’t even have a name, Danny.  I just have the coordinates.  Isn’t that amazeballs?”

“I haven’t the foggiest.”

“It is, so,” She stuck her tongue out at him, “Anyway, once we get to Mexico, we get to the boat, we get to the island; bing, bang, boom, we’re free and clear.”

Something told him that there was going to be a lot of hard work between the bing and the bang and the boom, but he loaded his bags into the trunk anyway.

* * *

 

Danny hadn’t been driving for more than half an hour when Mindy yelled, “Step on it!” directly into his ear.

He pressed his foot to the gas pedal for a full ten seconds before he realized that there was no police car or suspicious vehicle with tinted windows following them.  “What the hell?”

“Sorry, I just always wanted to say that.  We didn’t get a chance to say all the fun cliché robbery stuff at the bank.  No _put your hands in the air_. No _this is a stick up_.  It was all very high tech and classy.  Until you know,”  His fingers tensed involuntarily around the gearshift, “It all happened.”

He glanced over at his traveling companion, her hair tied back in a silk scarf because she claimed it was more on brand for Bonnie and Clyde, her over-sized sunglasses blocking most of her face, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  
 “I know.  But  I really don’t how you got so shook by some old ladies in funny hats.”  So apparently they were going to do the opposite of what he said from that point forward.  

“You mean the nuns?  I don’t expect you to understand, since you’re some kind of heretic—“

“I’m Hindu, not a devil worshipper,” Mindy tersely reminded him.

“I don’t need your sass mouth right now.  I was confused.”If she’d have jumped out of a trash can and stared directly into the face of Sister Mary Sins No More, she’d have been equally as baffled, so he didn't understand why she was trying to act all superior now.

“It wasn’t like they were a herd of unicorns, Danny, they were ELDERLY WOMEN.”

“It was my entire religious education, looming right in front of me, while I committed Armed Robbery.  It wasn’t a coincidence.  It was divine intervention.”

He could hear the eye roll in her voice, “It was payday at the Baggy Black Dress Factory.”

“It was a sign from God.”He couldn’t have spent that many years across the Sunday dinner table from Father Francis without eventually witnessing some sort of miracle.What had his mother been lighting candles for all this time?

“You’re getting awfully uppity about rules and laws and sins for someone who lost their medical license for doing things equally as unlawful.”  

“It wasn’t…” He couldn’t explain how these were two separate things, his helping Stevie out with the business versus turning to a life of full on, balls to the wall criminal activity.  But it was different, and he actually liked the structure of Stevie’s dealings; ripping the page clean off his prescription pad, and never really having to know what happened after that.  The random beatings—they were bonuses, ways to work out aggression that a heavy bag just couldn’t.  Plus, most of those guys were degenerates and deadbeats, and it was cathartic for him.  

After forty miles of road and pent up aggravation, he was about to turn back to her and tell her exactly how it was—every dirty, horrifying bit of it, but she was singing along to the mixtape she’d somehow managed to make, and he just couldn’t bring himself to argue anymore.

He wasn’t sure how she did it, how she could always manage to make time for things that didn’t seem that important.  How she'd carefully curated a soundtrack--including _Born to Run_ \--for a getaway that she seemed to have been sure they were going to have. **  
**

She just seemed to know him, even if he’d made every attempt to keep her at arm’s length.And for the near future, that was probably as much distance as he’d be able to get away from her as well.

In five years of marriage, Danny had memorized every other freckle on Christina’s back, and knew exactly how she liked her coffee and loved her parents, and hated her middle name; and none of it meant that he knew that everything was going to fall apart.He’d only spent a few weeks with Mindy, and had been able to collect almost exactly the same information, and he couldn’t seem to imagine how any of it would end.

As each mile marker ticked downward, Danny mentally added at least another month to his prison sentence and simultaneously removed a year from his lifespan.

“Listen, Danny, this whole tortured soul routine you have going on…don’t get me wrong, it’s aces.  Lady boners for days because, oh boy, do girls love a project.  But don’t you ever just want to let go?”

He wasn’t able to pinpoint the moment she’d become his conscience, or maybe even some kind of spiritual guide, but the one thing that he hadn’t been for longer than he wanted to admit was _honest_.He grumbled in response.

“This isn’t you.  Danny Castellano doesn’t rob banks.  He takes care of his Ma, he goes to church on Sundays, he cares what witches---“

“Nuns.”He corrected, in hopes of deterring wherever she was going with this line of thought.

“He cares what nuns think of him.  He kisses girls in alleys because he wants to know what it feels like.”  And there it was.  In their few days after being reunited neither of them had even intimated that a kiss had taken place between them, and he was almost hoping that she would have followed his lead and just left it where it belonged, in the past.  She had a boyfriend, even if he was in jail, and she seemed to still be into him, if her weird gun memento was any indication.

He’d acted on the urge to kiss her because he thought he’d never see her again, not because he was trying to invite her on a fugitive road trip with his tongue.

And he definitely couldn’t admit it out loud, but kissing her was the first honest thing he had done in months. “It is me, Mindy.  All that stuff.  And the other stuff too.”  He certainly wasn’t going to meet her eyes, even though he could feel them boring into his neck.  

She patted his abdomen resolutely from across the console.  “It’s okay, Castellano.  I’m gonna crack you open like a piñata, and all your secrets are going to come tumbling out.  Just you wait.”

Which, as a statement, was far more terrifying than the prospect of thirty-six years and seven months (and counting) in prison.

 

 

* * *

 

 

“Wake up, Danny, we’re going to the mall!”

And he thought he had already cornered the market on horrifying prospects.

“Nope.No. Not a chance.”If he could have clung to the door handle while she pulled on his legs like a cartoon character, he would have.“No way, Mindy.Our faces are on the six o’clock news.We are WANTED.We cannot go in a mall and just—What the hell do we need to do in a mall?”Sweat was already pouring down his back.He knew he never should have let her drive.Or trusted her enough to allow himself to fall asleep in the passenger seat.

“We need supplies, Danny.Do you expect us to flee our homeland with only the clothes on our backs?”

He glanced first at the hulking glass atrocity across the parking lot and then back at his car-mate.“Yes.”

Mindy’s eyes lasered straight through him, possibly nicking important brain cells along the way.“We’re going in.”

“No, this is terrible idea.We’re going to get arrested.”  He shook his head.  


“Don’t try to talk me out of it.It’s like when I decide what I want for lunch, and Jeremy suggests somewhere else, but my stomach has already decided no, shawarma,and then I won’t even go with him wherever he’s going because I really need that sweet, succulent lamb, and I already decided:shawarma.”

Danny sighed.“You are exhausting.”

“I like to think of it as being incapable of relenting.”Mindy smiled at him, the incandescent one that jolted most every electrical impulse in his body.Clear that she was getting her way and he was helpless to stop her, she extracted a baseball hat and navy blue hoodie from the backseat and thrust them into his lap.“Wear these and shut your trap.”

Danny dressed robotically, as if Mindy had recently programmed him to do only as she said.He felt like a chump, and from his reflection in the rearview mirror, he looked suspicious as hell.He figured there’d be no less than six calls to the FBI about his whereabouts before he even got to the food court.

She gave him a swift and approving once-over, her eyes twinkling.He pretended to ignore the swirling in his gut, the one that felt almost exactly like waking up.“Aw, you look like a first grader.How does a hat make you age backward?Sorcerer.” _She’s in love with someone else, idiot.Not you._

__

Strapping on her faux-pregnancy pillow/wallet and pulling her hair out of its tiny ponytail so that it swept into her face, Mindy threw open the driver’s side door and stepped out into the cool afternoon air.“Come on, Danny, let’s get our shop on.”

Danny was careful to follow a few feet behind, surreptitiously to patrol for prying eyes, but instead he became transfixed by the sashay in Mindy’s walk and the immaculate curves of her ass. Now _that_ was a church worth worshiping in.

__

  
_ Irabu.Petite.Rivera. Wells.Girardi. _ He felt the shift of his blood flow toward his groin, and the imminent erection. _Damnit.Posada!_ The 1998 Yankees roster had never let him down before but there was a first time for everything, he supposed. 

He jogged to catch up to her, and the image he caught in the glass entrance door was not that of two felons on a wasteful and possibly dangerous side trip, but of a beautiful pregnant woman and her partner, his hand resting lightly on the small of her back as he guided her into the vestibule.

Danny was in far more trouble than he thought.

 

 

 

* * *

 “No.Nope. Not happening.Not another step.”  Danny bent deeply at the waist, hands on the tops of his thighs to steady himself.  


Mindy was close enough that he could smell the vaguely minty soap of the hotel they’d stopped to shower in that morning, and see how her lipstick veered slightly underneath her lip line.

“C’mon, Danny.I can't lose you now.”She had rows of colorful shopping bags lined up along both arms, and he'd been the recipient of more than one dirty look for allowing such a noticeably pregnant person carry her own purchases.Like he needed one more thing to feel guilty about on this godforsaken trip.

His breath was coming faster than it needed to and the entire experience had all the components of a panic attack.“No.I’m not going through one more door with the blaring music and the discotheque lighting…or the rooms so dark you can’t see the seventy dollar price tag on the t-shirt.The T SHIRT, Min!Is it spun with gold?And the employees with the phony compliments—“

“No, those compliments are legit, Danny.Your eyelashes are on fleek.”

“I don’t—And the holes…in the jeans…why can’t a person buy a full pair of jeans?With all the fabric as Levi Strauss intended? ”

She rolled her eyes at him.“Why do I feel like we’re veering into a Kids Today rant? And that will quickly devolve into a whole Why Americans Are Falling Behind China situation, and then, ugh,”she groaned.

Mindy led him to a partially obscured leather upholstered bench behind the _You Are Here_ kiosk, rubbing soothing concentric circles between his shoulder blades as they went.Danny didn’t want to admit how comforting the motion actually was, and when he felt his breathing beginning to regulate, he allowed her to continue as she had been.

She scanned the options on the directory, “Would an Orange Julius help?Or a soft pretzel?How about a cookie?”

“I don’t see how diabetes—“

The circles on his back slowed, much to his chagrin, “Danny, stop acting like you just got Rumspr—Rumspring-Rumsprung—what is the past tense of Rumspringa anyway?You’re from New York City, the busiest city in the world, and some suburban mall is going to take you down?Man up!”

If it was just the lights and the jeans and the exorbitant retail prices, he probably wouldn’t have needed to put his head between his knees.This was a full blown panic attack.

“I just…I need a minute.”He looked up at her, pleadingly.

Legitimate concern flickered across Mindy’s face.  Their eyes locked, if only for a moment, and Danny saw something pass behind hers that looked like recognition.Like maybe she really could read his mind.“It’s going to be okay, Danny.We aren’t going to have to run forever.”

“Maybe.But we’ll always be looking over our shoulders.”

“But just think of it, Danny, once we get there, no one will know us.We’ll have a fresh start.We can be anyone we want.You could be young and cool again.I could go to medical school.Maybe you could find a practice there, or open a clinic.We could get our lives back.The ones we were meant to have.”

If life were ever that simple, he’d just squeeze his eyes closed and all of his problems would disappear forever. 

“That’s a nice idea, Min, it is.But I don’t know if that’s true for us.”

She sat up straighter, “I won’t let it not be true.And you should do the same.Plus, maybe you could tell me stuff; instead of holding it all in until you go berserk in Crabtree and Evelyn?” **  
**

“Deal.”

Confident that he wasn’t going to turn into a crying puddle of goo in the food court, Mindy studied her phone, “Now that we have that settled, I’m just going to run over to Nieman Marcus and see if they have these Valentino booties in my size.”

“Booties?Are you kidding me? You’re a grown woman.They’re boots.Call them boots.”

“There he is, the Danny that I know and love.You’re already coming back around.You’ll be shaking your fist at the Au Bon Pain girl about bread prices in no time.”She gave him a little squeeze on the top of his arm, and he ignored the dive-bomb that his heart did beneath his breastbone.“Be back in five, I swear.”

Danny watched out of the corner of his eye as Mindy struggled to gather her abundant purchases.He sighed heavily, “Leave it.I’ll take care of ‘em.”

She leaned down, twisting under the brim of his ball cap, and kissed his cheek.“You’re the best, Danny.”

Perhaps at that moment, Danny should have been concentrating less on the deeply profound dizzying effect that Mindy brushing his face with her lips had had upon him, and more on the overly curious mall security guard that had been circling them.

Mindy turned to flounce off in her attempt to bolster the local economy when Danny recognized the static of the rent-a-cop’s radio, and his heartbeat jolted even further into overdrive.

Before he could manage a single word, he had grabbed Mindy by the forearm and yanked her off in the opposite direction, running toward the exit; her packages strewn like pieces of over-sized confetti on the shiny marble flooring.

Danny’s legs pumped with pure fear, and his shoes squeaked as he quickly turned down a dark hallway that he hoped would eventually lead outside.Mindy was panting loudly behind him, keeping up as best she could.The security guard yelled at them to stop, and Danny knew that there’d be more than just an overweight man on a Segueway waiting for them outside if he didn’t think quickly.

A giant blue metal recycling container sat at the end of the long corridor, near the Emergency Exit.Danny threw open the exit door, the alarm’s scream echoing throughout the hall.She gave him a quizzical look as Danny scaled the side of the dumpster easily, waiting for Mindy to do the same.Her mouth gaped open and closed, her brow furrowing.“Danny, I can’t!” She whispered.

“Get your ass up here, Lahiri,” he hissed.He’d be encouraging later, when his life wasn’t passing before his eyes.

He flashed back to the years he spent watching his heroes cleverly extract themselves from sticky situations, and all he could think was that somehow he'd managed to miss the point entirely.

“Just step there,” he pointed out a ledge, “and put your hand there,” he indicated a ridge, “and I’ll pull you the rest of the way.I promise.”He reached for her as her face began to crumble into a pout.“Please.”

Grasping both of her hands, Danny pulled with all of his core strength, and Mindy pushed off the platform with her legs, heaving herself breasts first into the recycling container.

She landed with a thud on his chest, toppling Danny onto his back like a human domino, her hands coiled flush against his abdomen, her pregnancy pillow padding his groin.

The container was cool and dark in the shade of the deconstructed cardboard, and Mindy’s face was close enough that Danny could’ve captured her bottom lip in his own without moving a muscle.They lay completely still, nose to nose, as they waited for the footsteps to pass them by.

Mindy’s nose twitched against his, her expression softening.“Dan—“

Something was happening, and it wasn’t just him.He was sure of it.He wanted to reach for her face again, and he saw how her lip curled into a tiny smile as she imagined it happening too.He shifted an infinitesimal amount, enough to carry out his intentions, when he heard murmuring voices approaching.

Mindy’s body tensed, her breasts pressing harder into his pectoral muscles, her neck curving with the strain of keeping her head up while remaining as still as possible.He locked his hands behind her back, steadying her.Mindy gestured with her eyebrows, with what seemed to Danny like, _to hell with it_ and she lowered her head, her breath hot against his ear.

Danny prayed for death’s quick embrace, because it was rapidly becoming clear that no amount of Yankees line up recitation was going to override the short circuit in his system, and if he was dead, at least his blood flow would stop betraying him.  


Minutes passed as Danny lay as still as possible, cradling Mindy in his arms, until the footsteps and voices receded.When it was clear that they had somehow managed to elude capture, Mindy sat up swiftly, boxes scattering in her wake.

Still not taking her eyes off his face, Mindy helped pull Danny into a sitting position.Seconds passed that it seemed she was contemplating whether he needed to be punched or kissed.She acted on neither.Instead, she offered him her hand again, and they stood up together, peeking over the top and peering down the empty corridor.Standing on her tiptoes, Mindy whispered into his ear, “Coast is clear.”

God, how he wished that were true.

* * *

The shock of wavy hair that fell over her right eye made her seem oddly vulnerable, but Danny couldn’t quite seem to bring himself to reach over and push it behind her ear like he wanted.  But he really, really wanted.   


It was almost too easy for him to watch her as she’d taken her shifts driving—the way she’d determinedly bite down on her bottom lip when she passed a truck on a two lane highway; the way she always seemed to grip the wheel at ten and two and demand that he change the music because she was afraid to take her eyes off the road.He’d been collecting bits of Mindy minutiae, as if he’d need them later, and he chided himself for imagining any kind of future with her.

He didn’t have that luxury anymore:the idea that a future with anyone, let alone Mindy, could belong to him.

But she was in the seat next to him, in a ludicrous car, partaking in ludicrous adventures, and all the while, for every grin or glance or half-baked scheme, it felt like maybe something could be possible.

They were running away together, after all.

But even after she allowed her hand to linger over his on the gearshift as she turned up the volume on _Thunder Road_ , singing along with Bruce about the long walk to his front seat,  Danny knew in his gut that she wasn’t imagining a future.She was fleeing a past that didn’t suit her.

Neither of them belonged in that bank, making those choices, paying for those mistakes.The problem was Danny wasn’t sure which one of them was paying the higher price.

Maybe Mindy only knew the version of Danny Castellano that he’d tried to spit shine and present to her, but it was growing apparent that she seemed to like the one he’d been pretending not to be even more.

 ***

They’d gotten as far as North Carolina when Mindy announced she couldn’t possibly sit in the car for another second, and he begrudgingly pulled into the gravel lot of a travel lodge to placate her.

He was weary of sitting in crummy hotel rooms being forced to watch romantic comedies and shows about celebrity murders, so he volunteered to go for a run, both cardio and snack related.  And anyway, something about the idea of a having a pleasant ache in his bones was beginning to appeal to him.  


Danny heard the barking dogs before he recognized the hulking figure behind them, and he slammed himself flat against a nearby brick wall, hoping to somehow miraculously blend in, or maybe even disappear into the masonry without detection.  Because it was clear from the menacing dart in Morgan’s previously kind eyes (not to mention the visible bulge of a weapon in his cargo shorts) that Danny’s best option for survival was becoming invisible.  Swiftly.  

A thousand questions flitted through Danny’s mind without answer:  How could Morgan have known where they were?  Did Mindy tell him?Was she some kind of double agent?

He could barely hear himself think over the roar of his hyper-vigilant circulatory system, and he peeked around the corner to see Morgan and his pack of barking canines retreating in the opposite direction.  Danny ran as fast as he could back toward the motel, his footfalls sharp on the ragged pavement.  

The ridiculous car with the pink mustache was still parked in front of Room 203, and Danny’s hands shook as he worked the key in the lock.  They had to leave town quickly, if they could even leave together.  What if Mindy _had_ betrayed him?

His heart stormed inside of his chest, the adrenaline still marching through his veins.  He flicked on the light, pulling his sweat soaked sweater and t-shirt over his head.  “Min, you’re never gonna believe who I just—“  

The room was dark and too still, and immediately, a lump formed in his throat.  Flicking on the light, the faulty glow revealed a deep maroon stain that billowed into a large sized puddle next to Mindy--who laid face down and utterly still on the cheap floral coverlet.   “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,”  Danny knelt next to her, carefully pulling her onto her back to check for breathing, and her pulse,  "Please, Min, no."  


She opened one eye.  “What the hell, Castellano?”  

 

In Danny’s limited experience with the deceased, he’d found that they rarely opened an eye.  Or spoke.  And never in such an accusatory tone.

“The blood…you were so still…I thought Morgan had…”

She sat up, pulling her stained nightshirt back down over her thighs modestly.  “Oh my God, Danny.  You are such a dork.”

“I’m a dork?  How is this…Wait, _what_ is this?”  Danny sniffed at his fingers.  Her blood had awfully oaky legs.

“I was watching _Amelie_ on cable, and I must have fallen asleep with my bottle of red wine. Find your chill, man.”  As if that was a perfectly logical reason to look like a gunshot victim and convince him that she had been murdered.  Which, in retrospect, was probably exactly how she'd choose to go, but never mind that.  


Danny swiped a damp hand at the bridge of his nose, hoping that he reached the tear that had formed, before it became apparent to his observant cohort.  Maybe if he just tried to will it back into his lacrimal duct—nope, that sounded like a very loud sniffle.  “You are unbelievable.”

Mindy scanned his face, and Danny wished that he had the ability to swivel his head 180 degrees, like an owl.  “Oh my God, Danny.  You really thought I was dead.  And so did your face!  Aww, you lurrrrvvvve me!  You want me to be a-li—ive.”  She sang, practically pressing her nose against his.

Danny reared back.  “I do not.”  

“You wish I was dead?”

  
“Right now, a little.But not usually.”

 

“How often?”She was gearing up to angry, and he needed to abort this mission or else this was going to turn into a double homicide by wine bottle.

 

“How often what?”

 

“How often do you wish I was dead?”

 

“I’m not on trial here.”Danny crossed his arms in front of his chest. He definitely wished _he_ was dead.“But I will be if we don’t book it.”He figured he could right this derailing train with his mostly sobering news, “Morgan is here.”

Mindy paused for a moment, "You know what? I thought I smelled Beverly’s hair pomade when we were at the gas station!" 

  
"Beverly too?  Shit."  Danny pushed himself off the sagging mattress, and began to quickly pack up his belongings, and help Mindy with hers.

They left the wine as it was, hoping that their pursuers might think of it as a message, along with a generous tip for the housekeeping crew.

* * *

He’d begun to notice the creases around her eyes that she’d complained about on that first night, the ones she’d said belonged to her mother and not to her, and Danny realized that Mindy was leaving something behind too.

 

Whether it was that orange-skinned Red Coat traitor Jeremy, or her little brother that she’d raised, or her dream of finding love in the greatest city in the world, it was all hundreds of miles behind both of them, and would only get further away.

 

He couldn’t even remember the last breakfast he’d had without her—that morning she’d insisted on McDonald’s flap jacks, and while he’d felt his own arteries corroding with plaque at the mere suggestion, he marveled at the childlike glee with which she applied syrup, and he wondered why he wasn't allowed to feel the same way about something.

 

Mindy slumped against the passenger door, Danny’s hoodie a make-shift pillow.He glanced at her as she snored softly, a slumbering kitten basking in the late afternoon sun, and before he knew what he was doing, Danny had reached across the front seat to thread a bit of hair back off of her face.

 

She startled a little, murmuring about Filet O Fish and Fassbender, but settled back against the seat, curling into herself.Danny allowed his fingers to ghost down the side of her face, and then her neck, until finally resting lightly in the hollow of her shoulder.

 

At the next stoplight, somewhere further into South Carolina, he leaned over and gently brushed his lips across her forehead, his nose lightly skimming the crest of her hairline.

 

He’d deny it if she asked, but for those few seconds (before she snorted and turned in her sleep, effectively jolting him into cardiac arrest for fear he’d been caught), he was sure that he was taking the best part of the past with him.


	5. I Had A Thought, Dear, However Scary

“Where are we?” Mindy’s voice was raspy with sleep and disuse, somewhere outside of Charleston.  Danny was following a semi a little too closely, and he tapped twice on his brake to keep from tailgating.

The front seat was balmy with the kind of humidity that happened when it was too cold to keep the air conditioning running but just a little too warm not to, and silent except for the sound of their breathing; he’d turned the music off a few hours before.

“Go back to sleep,” he said brusquely, and she tossed him her hurt, little girl lost look. Her disappointment reverberated beneath his breastbone and Danny turned back to her, catching her eye out of the corner of his, the taillights of the truck still in his sights. “Sorry. You were just so peaceful, that’s all.”

* * *

 

Danny dumped a handful of crumpled bills onto the check-in counter and tried to ignore his reflection in the bullet-proof Lucite that separated the attendant from the general public.

He’d been thinking about it since they’d left the last town, about how his face had been sending Mindy messages that the rest of him wasn’t prepared to follow through with, not in the slightest. His countenance shouldn’t act independently from his frame, or his brain, but that seemed to be the case, and one he didn’t quite know how to address.

Was he expected to stop looking at her? Pull the strings on his hoodie so tightly he most closely resembled the kid from South Park? Three cubic feet separated them at all times; it wasn’t like he could just avoid her by jumping into the back seat and pulling a blanket over his head.

Armed with a room key and complimentary foil sleeve of Pop-Tarts ( _But no toaster, sorry!_ , the clerk had slid the metallic silver packet across the desk like a consolation prize, or the world's least effective prophylactic), Danny came to the slow realization that he hadn’t requested a double room, as per usual.

He wasn’t accustomed to this kind of treason by his own subconscious.

This had to be a new low.

Mindy appeared at his elbow, her strawberry mouth bowed in anticipation. She was always like a kid at Christmas when they opened the door to a new room for the first time, like maybe this time the bedspread wouldn’t be polyester and the curtains wouldn’t be pockmarked with cigarette burns. Her ability to expect more than the bare minimum from even a roadside roach motel was both endearing and enraging, all at the same time.

A blast of canned air hit them as Danny pushed open the door, wedging one of Mindy’s bags into the room in front of him. It was nicer than their usual standard: tiny writing desk, tiny television set, tiny nightstand with tiny Bible, tiny fridge with tiny mini-bar, tiny Queen-sized sagging mattress.

He didn’t stand a chance.

Mindy collapsed into a heap on the side of the bed closest to the air conditioner, arms and legs outstretched, and Danny sat gingerly on the edge of the wooden chair tucked near the desk. “What are you doing? Writing a letter from camp? You’ve been driving all day. Relax.” She patted the mattress next to her.

Danny shook his head. “I’m good.” He could sleep in this chair. It seemed ergonomic enough. They’d become more efficient fugitives if he slept in this chair. He bet Thomas Jefferson slept in his chair, for the four hours a day he slept, or whatever that was. If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers, it was good enough for Danny Castellano.

Mindy sat up, rolling her neck and cracking it audibly before she stood up to collect toiletries, fresh underwear and a t-shirt from her bags. “Okay weirdo. I’m gonna hop in the shower. You can man the desk. Hold all my calls.”

He made some kind of grumbling response, only really pronouncing three out of six words in his sentence, and Mindy disappeared, shrugging at his odd behavior, into the likely mildewed shower closet.

With Mindy safely ensconced in the bathroom, Danny spread himself out on the bed for a temporary reprieve. She had been right about how cramped and malformed he was from driving all day, and his desire to perch on a wooden chair for the remainder of the evening was low at best. He flipped through channels, finally landing on SportsCenter, and highlights of games that seemed so far away--a time when he actually cared more that the Yankees won than anything else that was going on around him.

Priorities—man, how they’d changed.

The pipes announced a resounding protest as Mindy shut off the water, and Danny braced himself for her return. He didn’t want to admit that his favorite thing about sharing these wretched spaces had to be the moment when she’d open the bathroom door right after her shower. Maybe it was how the scents of whatever shampoo or potion or elixir she’d just used billowed out in the fresh steam, filling every corner of the room. Or maybe it was her newly rejuvenated and pleasant nature as she emerged, clean and relaxed. It just seemed to Danny that the aromas of freesia and lavender and the mint of her toothpaste as she smiled at him from the doorway made each new room seem a little bit more like home.

Mindy erupted from the foggy bathroom, hair up in a turban to dry, already dressed. Danny resisted the urge to wrap her in the curtains a la Scarlett O’Hara, just so he could stop fixating on the plane of her t-shirt as it hit her upper thighs. But that would be blaming the victim, so he gathered himself off the bed and set about staring directly into his luggage, pretending to look for something vague, yet vitally important.

Mindy babbled on about a dream she’d had in the car, about Jeremy and Betsy the bank teller, and how Beverly had stolen Siegfried and Roy’s white tigers, only she thought that might have been true, and did Danny want to go find a burger joint because she was really craving a greasy burger after all that tiger talk—totally unrelated, of course.

Danny mumbled something unintelligible, still avoiding watching her as she paced, and the hem of her shirt rode up with every movement.

Mindy stopped in front of him, arms outstretched in exasperation. “Good God, do you also write the next week on… _Mad Men_ summaries? Use adjectives, man! Action verbs! Did Timmy fall down the well? Speak, boy, speak!”

“I thought you would be too young to make that reference.” He smirked. It was the first time in hours he’d felt like their usual dynamic had returned.

“Shut up.” Her tone contained just a hint of relief on her part, as well. She peered into his face, sitting down next to him on the mattress. “What is going on with you? You’re acting more uptight than usual and you’ve seemed angry with me for more than a couple of states now.”

“I’m just thinking. Am I not allowed to think anymore? A man’s home is his castle, and…”

She cut him off, before the rant devolved. “Oh my God, Danny, let’s slow down for a second. You’re allowed to think. I just don’t like how you’re doing it.” She smiled, crawling between the sheets.

He accidentally caught another glimpse of the lavender chevron pattern on her panties and had to say a small prayer to keep himself from physically announcing that to the other occupant of the room.

“Really? You don’t like how I’m thinking?” _If she only knew…_

“Listen, I don’t know if this will help you but it helps me sometimes? Whenever I was worried about the future, no matter what it was, my Mom would tell me that I needed to remember: What’s coming is better that what has gone. And I’d just repeat that over and over in my head; I’d doodle it on the bottom of my test—even though it was kind of the opposing viewpoint of my history teacher—but if I was scared of the unknown, that always made me less scared.”

“I’m not scared of anything. When I want your help, I’ll ask for it.” Danny was trying very hard not to cross his arms defensively, but instead he twitched a little and scratched at his nose.

The hurt was evident on her face. “I know that you can’t just do a whole Wonder Woman spin and suddenly turn all cuddly and warm. But you’re going to have to cut me some slack.”

“I’m not trying to—“

“I know, Danny, but it’s---it’s like you think I’m not giving anything up. I don’t have a lot of other people in my life anymore. My parents are gone, Rishi is in school, and with this—you’re stuck with me. And I’m stuck with you.”

“We’re not _stuck_ with each other.”

“Okay, fine. If we’re choosing this, then do better. Be better at being a human person.”

“Jesus.” Was he really that bad?

“You don’t have to be Jesus. Just Danny. Don’t get me wrong, I know you feel bad. That you probably even blame yourself for the guy in a fig leaf that ate his girlfriend’s apple.” She giggled. “That sounded dirty.”

“Forgive her Heavenly Father; she knows not what she says.” Danny prayed aloud that time.

“Oh come on."  She rolled her eyes,  "That was hardly necessary, and you know it. Anyway, newsflash: you don’t control the weather. You can’t control every detail. You make mistakes. And despite them, you’ll survive. We’ll survive. Don’t make me sing it, Danny.” Her face loomed closer, “Don’t make me do it.”

He shook her off, wincing, “I know I can’t control everything.”

“But you keep building these walls. I need a carabiner and those rock climbing shoes with the spiky thingies on the bottom—you get my drift. You’re a lot of work.” She was teary-eared and he wasn’t sure how they’d gotten to this point. “But you’re all I have now.”

“I’m all you have?”

“So can we just not…”

She was beautiful, with her streaky hair and her too bright lipstick, and the contours of her hips that seemed to fit precisely into his grasp, when he allowed himself to catch them.

“I’m sorry.”

“What—what was that?” She pretended not to understand, holding her hand to her ear.

“Oh, stop already. I’m sorry. For making you feel alone. When we’re clearly in this together.”

“That’s why you came with me. That’s why you even showed up at my door in the first place—You didn’t want to be alone. ”

“I probably should be.”

“See? That’s what I mean.”

“I know. Like you said, it’s going to take more than just a Wonder Woman spin.” He gave her hand a squeeze. “That was an oddly specific image.”

“Sorry, I just—When I was kid, I’d watch that with my Mom, and I just always thought…I thought one day I’d have an imaginary airplane too.” Her face turns into something wistful and far off. “But what I have is a fleet of Uber vehicles and a tiny Italian chauffeur, so who’s to say what’s worse?”

Danny laughed. “I guess you’re right.”

“And maybe we don’t always get along, but we’re family now, Danny. And that’s how it works.”

“Yeah, that’s how it works.” Danny repeated, filtering the words through his mind a second, third, and fourth time.

* * *

 

 

Mindy flipped to a rerun of _Murder She Wrote_ while Danny lounged next to her with a dog-eared copy of a Grisham novel that had been left behind by the last tenant. It was one he’d read before, back in his former life, but he was starved for something written over a third grade level or not on the back of a cereal box.

Danny looked up when he realized that Mindy’s hand was running patterns over his knee absentmindedly while Jessica Fletcher flitted through Cabot Cove, LL Bean sweater tied jauntily around her neck. That Angela Lansbury was one classy broad, but she was no JAG.

Nudging Mindy,  “Whatcha doing?” His voice emerged an octave higher than he expected.

“Danny, I think the bus driver did it.” She was positively transfixed, barely acknowledging his actual question.

“Yeah?”

She glanced down at her hand, precariously close to his groin. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Mindy fiddled with the remote control, consequently occupying both of her hands, but not taking her eyes off the ancient television set, leaving Danny feeling like an idiot for saying anything at all.

It was his knee (and a little of his thigh, fine), not his dick. It wasn’t like she was absently toying with his balls while a senior citizen solved crimes in New England. She was being friendly. And he was acting like a moron.

Danny turned away, muttering his good night, and fell asleep before the episode ended, dreaming restlessly about murderous bus drivers and white tigers and Mindy’s hand on his thigh.

His bladder woke him before the sun did, his body having defied and/or ignored any laws of personal boundaries in his sleep. He’d slept on top of the bed clothes to help avoid any mishaps, but even with the precaution, Mindy’s arm covered his torso, her face mashed into his armpit, his leg thrown over both of hers. He briefly wondered about her gravitational pull, and if she realized that his pit hair was what was tickling her nose as breathed.

He slipped away from her grasp and into the restroom, trying to shake the cobwebs from his brain, washing his hands for longer than strictly necessary.

When he returned to bed, she was curled onto her side, facing away from him, inched closer to her, back to back, until their rear ends balanced against each other; their last remaining touch point.

The room was cold in the early morning haze, and Mindy’s body warm, and Danny was very, very tired. Tired of running, tired of them both sticking out like sore thumbs in back woods Southern towns, tired of denying whatever it was that could possibly happen with Mindy. He was safe with her, for the moment, and he could finally sleep.

Later that afternoon, after they’d both slept in late and luxuriously, Danny was sent on lunch related reconnaissance mission, leaving Mindy on guard.

It was a sunny but blissfully cool day, almost like the arrival of fall in New York, but in August in the Deep South, and Danny hadn’t even minded tooling around searching for the thickest chocolate shake in town.

Somehow his key wasn’t working in the lock, so he had to hold the bags of food between his knees as he fiddled and futzed with the knob. After a few minutes of fumbling, the tumblers clicked and Danny pushed the door open with his elbow.

His earlobe burned as the bullet zinged out the hotel room door, and buried itself in the plaster behind him. A sulfuric smell hung in the air and out of instinct or self- preservation, Danny dropped to the floor, fries scattering onto the shag carpet.

Mindy hunched the corner, nine millimeter clutched in her hand, a horrified expression locked on her face.

“You just shot me!” He yelled, at least 80 percent of his hearing gone.

“I grazed you.” He swore that was what she said. That couldn’t have been right.

“You shot me!” Danny held his ear, knowing that one more inch to the left and he wouldn’t have had a cheekbone or a functioning eye anymore. He didn’t want to think about one more inch to the north.

“Oh my God, I just shot you.” Mindy’s face turned from triumphant to remorseful and her lip quivered with the beginning of fresh tears.

He crawled to her, gently removing the weapon from her hand, “No more gun duty for you.” It was hard to believe that he was reassuring the person who’d just SHOT HIM (okay, fine, barely shot him) but that was the magical power of Mindy for you. She’d shoot you, and you’d apologize to her for it. _I’m sorry I got in the way of your wildly firing bullets into the air and doorway. Next time I’ll duck faster._

With Mindy properly distracted by greasy cheeseburgers and thick chocolate shakes (crispy fries forlornly thrown in the trash), Danny hid the firearm deep in their collective luggage, Jeremy’s leering smile directed at a bag of their dirty underwear.

They were three towns over and two hundred miles into the next leg of the trip before Mindy finally announced that she’d lost her gun, and Danny did nothing to correct her.

* * *

 

Danny and Mindy had established early on that a direct route to their escape boat would only give the police their exact whereabouts, so they often drove in a zig-zag pattern on their GPS, circling back and forth across highways they’d already traveled and off course by several hundred miles at a time.

“Why don’t we do anything fun anymore, Danny?” She had taken off her sneakers an hour before, her stockinged feet balanced on the dashboard, causing Danny to mumble several rejoinders about sanitary conditions within the confines of the small vehicle.

“You mean more fun than staying alive and escaping to our private island where we are not wanted by law enforcement or our group of wayward co-conspirators?”

“Yes.” The word she’d said was yes, but the tone sounded more like, _duh._

“I’m sorry if this doesn’t fit into your hectic schedule of whimsy and hullabaloo but we need to get going before I get a bullet between the eyes. Do you want me to get a bullet between the eyes?” He still had buzzing in his ear (not to mention, a glaring red gash) from the last bullet leveled in his general direction.

“No, of course not,” she said sheepishly. “But there were signs for a county fair? And what’s better than a couple of pounds of funnel cake and unlimited access to a petting zoo to relieve stress?”

“I can think of at least fifteen.” Danny glanced over at her, “Plus it will be swarming with cops, since there is no bigger group of criminals than carnie folk.”

“I don’t think you’re supposed to call them that. And with that logic, we will blend right in! No one will notice us when Tubby the Face Tattooed Fire Eater is on the loose. Please, Danny? Pretty pretty please? With cotton candy on top?”

“Ugh.”

Mindy settled back into the passenger seat, satisfied with her efforts. “It’s just ahead. Five miles on the left.”

After joining a mile long line of cars, Danny pulled into the grassy lot. “We’re setting up ground rules. This isn’t going to go south like the mall detour. First of all, we’re getting one funnel cake, one Sno-cone, and riding zero things that spin. No deep fried Twinkies, no deep fried Oreos—“

“And no fun,” Mindy finished for him. “Don’t take your anger toward those new Cookies and Cream Oreos out on the deep-fried ones. It’s not their fault.”

“They’re redundant! Oreos are already made of cookie and cream. Have an original thought, Nabisco!”

Only he’d barely stopped the car and she was already out like a shot, no longer participating in an argument about sandwich cookies, and definitely getting way ahead of him, just like always.

* * *

 

He couldn’t stop picturing how that damn droplet of ice cream had wound its way down Mindy’s wrist and her tongue, tinged cherry red, darted out to catch it.

Danny hadn’t smoked a cigarette in weeks, his last one a few days before the bank robbery, and he somehow managed to bum some off a harried looking teenager with giant gauges in his ears and tattoos lining his neck like a warning. He’d wanted to tell the kid something wise, some kind of gift of experience, because something about the kid told Danny that he needed it, but instead Danny only asked him for a smoke.

People got their wisdom all kinds of ways, Danny mused, waiting for Mindy to return with her second elephant ear of the day, the vendor’s line long and winding. He leaned against the metal trailer, lighting the purloined cigarette and taking a long, deep drag.

Letting the smoke circle through his lungs and releasing it slowly through his nostrils, he felt the nicotine seeping into his bloodstream, pinging across his neurons, bringing him an almost instantaneous peace.

He wished he could do something healthy, like meditation, but smoking always centered him.

The air behind the food stand was thick with the scent of the fryer, and a local country station blasted twangy music on a live remote, so Danny didn’t notice Mindy come up behind him.

“Nice death wish, Castellano.” She motioned to the cigarette; her hands full with a giant paper plate of cinnamon sugar covered fried dough.

“Same to you, Lahiri.” He nodded at the confection.

“But if you kissed _me_ , I wouldn’t taste like an ashtray.” She was doing the telepathic mind-reading Mindy thing again. “I’d taste like cinnamon and promises.”

He knew that she was teasing, but he’d have preferred it an invitation. He wanted to kiss her, long enough to gather a crowd, as if the onlookers thought they might be on a television dating show or a recently engaged couple that should be celebrated, to taste her sugar spun lips and her candied tongue.

And he never wanted to stop wanting to kiss her, which was exactly the problem.

He stubbed out the cigarette, and as reward, Mindy offered him a bite of her snack, the dough still warm and dripping with butter. He gobbled it off of her sticky fingers, the sugar melting beneath his tongue, the same synapses that had ceased fire with the surge of nicotine lolling him into a renewed sense of complacency.  He groaned aloud.

Mindy laughed at his semi-orgasmic reaction and dragged her thumb along his bottom lip, never taking her eyes off of his. “There was just a little…crumb.” She licked her finger then, and Danny thought he might have swooned.

 _Grown men don’t swoon_ , he thought, as he followed dutifully behind her, _it was the heat_.

After the fair, there’d been some giant ball of yarn that Mindy wanted to see, and Danny had been too sun fatigued to argue. They’d ended up at least fifty miles off of their original route, in another town whose sign mentioned the Confederacy with an unnecessary affinity, and the only place to stay looked like it might have been bombed out in some sort of roach related war. (The roaches having emerged victorious, of course.)

Danny lay on yet another scratchy motel comforter, the next in a long line of scratchy motel comforters, freshly showered and wearing only his boxers and t-shirt, as Mindy flipped through mindless television shows at his side. In a sudden burst of irritation, she zapped the television off and flicked the remote onto the bedside table.

They lay in companionable silence for a few minutes, and Danny even closed his eyes, thinking that he might be able to drift off to sleep.  They’d had a good day.

“I wish people came with warnings.” Mindy said, jolting him out of his drifting little reverie.

He flipped up onto his side. “They do. The warning is: Don’t fuck with ‘em.”

“Ugh, you cynic.” She dug her finger into his rib cage, “No, I just wish that there was an easy way to tell if someone is…you know, damaged?”

He feigned a hunchback and a similarly monstrous expression, “Like an as-is sticker? Buyer beware? Scratch and dent personality?”

“Kind of.” She shrugged. Maybe they’d been cooped up as fugitives for too long, but even after spending all day in the sun and yet another seedy motel room, she still smelled fantastic.

“Maybe, but I guess I just assume that everyone comes with that warning.”

“You should have come with a crack, from your forehead to your toes.” She traced a zig zag pattern down the line of his nose, to his clavicle, to his breastbone, across his ribs. He shivered as her finger trained over his abdomen and stopped at his groin. “You’re so broken.”

“Listen,” He rolled over, catching her wrist, and covered her with his full weight, noses touching. “I’m not the only one broken here.”  Their faces were separated only by their breath.

Overhead, the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, and seemed to somehow match the electrical pulses that were detonating throughout Danny’s body. And if he really stopped to think about all the ways he could serve to break her, he’d have to run from the room.

Instead, he grabbed gruffly at the buttons of her blouse; pawed at the zipper on her shorts as he pulled them down over her hips. Mindy gave a soft little moan, arching her back and legs, pointing her toes as she kicked off her clothing. She wrapped her hand around the back of his neck, skittering over the stubbly hairs there, and pulled his face to hers. He kissed her deeply then; biting, sucking, tasting; not making the slightest effort to be gentle. He interpreted her tiny sounds as approval—he’d forgotten how easily she could melt under his touch.

Danny cradled the buttery flesh of her hips, and marked a winding path of sloppier, wetter kisses down the column of her throat, and across her collarbone and down to her chest. Mindy murmured a string of curse words under her breath as he skimmed the underside of her breast with his teeth. He brushed his hands over her torso, kneading at the swells of her breasts, nipping and tagging her skin with tiny reddening marks. _Danny was here._ Mindy whimpered and moaned as he dragged his tongue over her belly button, inching lower.

Danny centered himself between her thighs, feeling the warmth radiating inches from his face, just out of his reach, his words fluttering against her thigh. “You don’t really want this.”

Her eyes flew open then, and she expelled a sharp breath, “Daniel, I swear to God. I will end you,” she said, grabbing a fistful of his hair.

Danny nudged her legs further apart, tracing his fingers along her pelvic bones, and dragging his tongue lavishly up her thigh. He licked into her, around her, a perfect circle, and sucked until her hips bucked and twisted. Seeking more, she clutched at his head, so he slid in one finger, then two, stroking in rhythm with his lips and tongue. Mindy came, loudly, shuddering against him; grasping wildly at the bedspread beneath her, Danny’s back, the headboard.

Mindy looked him directly in the eye, like she was about to say something earth-shatteringly important. And he ached to hear it. “Fuck me. Now.”

Well, okay.

Mindy moved to climb on top of him, but Danny used her momentum to flip her onto her stomach, and he ran his fingers slowly up her back, tracing the curve of her ass to the top of her spine, his hands slipping on her sweat slicked body. He tugged gruffly at the strands of her hair, burying kisses into the hollow of her neck, and pressed his erection into the crevice of her legs and ass, nudging them open with his knee. “You’re not the choir boy I thought you’d be, Castellano.” Mindy teased.

Danny thrust into her with a thoughtful urgency, and Mindy responded with a low hiss of pleasure.

Her hair stuck to his neck, her breathing keeping pace with their rhythm. Danny wasn’t even sure where he was anymore. He was blissed out and dizzy and satiated, and he wanted more of it. He felt like he’d won something, some kind of sexual and personal victory, and somewhere far off, he heard the theme from _Rocky_ playing.

Legs still boneless and liquid, Danny gathered Mindy onto his chest, mindlessly stroking at her hair as they recovered.

He gazed down at her, a singular streak of starlight breaking through the hotel room curtains and illuminating her features. Mindy smiled drowsily, giving his wrist an absent pat, “I have a bangin’ drum. I get it.”

“That’s not what—I mean, you do, but…” She had to save him from himself, really.

“A doctor, Danny.” Mindy interrupted, “I’ve always pictured myself with a doctor. Now I won’t have to Google my wine and drug interactions.”

“I’m not even a doctor anymore.” He wasn’t anything he used to be, he realized. Doctor, husband, hell, he was barely even someone’s son now.

He glanced at Mindy, her head thrown back, tiny beads of sweat still lining her forehead and lingering by her ear. She was wrecked and radiant. And in that moment, it became very apparent that he might actually love her. The panic rose from the pit of his stomach to intercept that feeling and attempt to mitigate it.

“We can’t do this again. It…you have a boyfriend.” He stammered, inching away from her on the bed. The phrase “you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube” sprang to mind rather suddenly.

“He’s in jail, Danny. We’re not…”

“Did you break up with him? Does he know? Is it Facebook official? If he still thinks that you two are a couple…then this isn’t right.”

“You know,” she sat up, her eyes glowing in the moonlight, “You keep telling me how wrong everything always is, but I think you’re the one that’s wrong. This is right.”

He shook his head, maybe more vehemently than necessary. “There is no this, Mindy, there is no us.” It sounded terrible, callous and he wanted to take it back as soon it came out of his mouth.

She looked stunned, her mouth dropping along with her sheet, her bare breasts exposed. “You know what?”

“What?” _It was a rhetorical question, you asshat._

“Stop telling me what a mistake you are. I’ll make my own mistakes. I don’t need you to protect me from them. Or from you.” Her nipple grazed his hand as she moved back toward him, and his body responded positively without his permission. “It’s been so easy for you to just sit on the sidelines and judge people who are actually trying to live—you just want to sit there and narrate everyone’s faults, but not actually have to do anything.”

If she thought anything had ever been easy for him, she hadn’t been listening. “Narrating’s your job, Mindy.”

“You know what, Danny? Fine. Keep pushing happiness away with both hands.” She jerked away then, rolling over to face the wall, expelling a tiny huff of annoyed air.

He lay still for a moment, his partner’s uncharacteristic silence a weight on his solar plexus. He could picture her smile from earlier that afternoon, pulling him toward a Tilt-A-Whirl he was determined not to ride: powerful and confident and certain. It was everything that drew him to her, despite his every effort not to be drawn.

He’d woefully underestimated her.

“Mindy?”

She expelled a long and heavy rush of air, a sigh of the highly put upon, a hallmark of the people he cared for. “Yeah?”

“You’re right, I’m sorry I--.” He couldn’t see her coming, but her lips searched for his in the darkness, her hands grasping at his chest.

“Don’t talk anymore, Danny. Just…just lean into it, okay?”

Danny was great at learning the wrong lessons. From his relationship from Christina, what should have been a simple, “Pick a more suitable, unselfish partner,” had instead turned into, “Don’t fall in love.”

So he leaned in anyway.


	6. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

 

Danny woke up the next morning with Mindy tangled around his torso, her bare breasts exposed as the comforter banded her waist.He hastily pulled the bedclothes up to cover her, and Mindy opened one eye.“If you’re not down with my life of debauchery and nudity, I don’t know if we can make this work.”

 

“I was trying to preserve your modesty.”

 

“I hate to break it to you, mister, but my modesty left here long ago.”

 

“Duly noted.”Danny kissed the side of her neck, remembering that he was finally done pretending that he hadn’t been wanting to do that for the last little while now **.** “’Morning, Min.”

 

“G’morning, Dan.”She snuggled tighter into his side, skimming her nails over his ribcage.It was hard to believe that he had been so reluctant to give into whatever this was, because it felt pretty incredible to wake up surrounded by Mindy.“I know it makes you hella nervous, so I’m going to save the State of the Relationship talk for later, okay?”

 

Because that’s what people do.They have sex and then decide what they mean to each other.Which was exactly the opposite of how it was supposed to work, or at least what he’d been taught in religious ed.“Deal.And it doesn’t make me nervous.”

 

“Yeah, right.”She scoffed.“You’re totally cool with everything.You barely even sweat any more when I mention events that could occur more than a week from now.It’s more of a misting.Just a gentle soothing glaze of perspiration that CLEARLY does not indicate any fear of any kind of commitment.You even make us pack our toothbrushes separately, like if they mingled, we might be married.”

 

“In some Southern states, Mindy, that is common law—“

 

He couldn’t argue as she straddled him, her breasts looming ever closer to his face, and as she covered his mouth with his, he really couldn’t remember what they were even arguing about.

 

Something about toothbrushes, maybe.  


 

 

 “You need closure.”Mindy announced a few hours into their next leg of the trip, gouging his shoulder with the binding of the magazine she’d been reading.“You didn’t get closure with Christina, and look at the mess I have to clean up.And your Mom---you have to be able to say good-bye to her.”

 

“She can’t be an accessory to our crime, Mindy.”

  
_I can’t hear how disappointed she is in me_ , was what he was actually thinking.

 

“You think that when my parents left that night for that dinner in the city that I knew they weren’t coming back?You know what it feels like—to wait for someone to come home.Don’t leave your Mom with that feeling.”

 

He knew too well, and the fact that his father chose to make him wait made him angrier still.He couldn’t count the number of headlights he imagined belonged to his father all those years, always thinking that the next pair turning up the driveway would be his.

 

No less than twenty-four hours after Mindy declaring it as an imperative, a nondescript rest stop somewhere in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains was chosen as the venue for Danny’s reunion with his mother, and travel arrangements made in a series of payphone calls to Stevie and his mother’s longtime friend, Dot.

 

Annette waited at a picnic table behind the concrete building, a scarf tied around her head, oversize sunglasses obscuring her face.Her color was good, she didn’t look too thin, and Danny immediately thought about ways he could get Stevie to text him her blood counts, “Ma.”Danny enveloped his mother in his arms, her familiar White Diamonds perfume pervading his senses.“You look great.”

 

“Daniel,” she said his name quietly, like a curse word.Like one of her c-words.“Daniel.”It was louder that time, and not as angry, maybe a little grateful.“You look like shit.”

 

Leave it to his ma to tell it like it was.He resisted the urge cling to her like he did when he was a little kid, or when he was sick, and she’d bring him homemade chicken soup and the Guinness Book of World Records.“I don’t know what happened, Ma, it just all fell apart so fast—“

 

Her voice was colder than he wanted it to be, sparer of feelings, “This isn’t you, Danny.This isn’t the boy I raised.But you made choices.You know what happened.”This was the mother that he had almost lost in the fire that was his father’s leaving, the same one that re-emerged to punish him for attempting to cheat on a math test in the seventh grade.

 

He couldn’t look his mother in the eye, so he scanned the parking lot instead.Mindy loomed over by their second vehicle, this one mustache-less, but still inexplicably pink.He couldn’t win for losing in the Uber getaway car game.The first one had literally caught fire in a convenience store parking lot, and the mechanic (who, incidentally, would not have seemed out of place barefoot chewing on a piece of straw) had announced, “Dirt in the fuel line…just blowed it away.” **  
**

 

“I can’t stay here.It’s too dangerous.There are people who want us—“ He couldn’t say _dead_ , not to his mother, “Captured.And Mindy has a place that we can go, where we can start over.”

 

“And you’re just gonna live with all this,” She stabbed at the air, her patented _you’ll pay for this, Daniel Alan Castellano_ motion, minus her trusty wooden spoon.“Over your head every day?Not answering to anybody?Danny.You know better.”His mother could be as prickly as barbed wire, and he’d seen her bring the butcher to tears for not cutting her rump roast lean enough.

 

“I’m sorry, Ma.” Head bowed, he stared at the wood grain of the rest stop picnic table, tracing out a cylindrical pattern.“I just…I needed to tell you good-bye.”

 

Annette removed her sunglasses and guided Danny’s chin so that he had no choice but to look at her.“Come back, and turn yourself in.They’ll cut you a deal.Cousin Don says he thinks he can get you a plea.”

 

“I didn’t bite the mailman, Ma.Cousin Don doesn’t really do human concerns.”

 

“None of his canine clients ever robbed a bank, Danny.But he can adjust.”

 

“Well, so can I.I’m going to adjust to living with this.”

 

“Is it the girl?”

 

The girl in question appeared to be edging closer and closer to the picnic area, her own natural curiosity outweighing any sense of privacy or discretion.He could practically smell Mindy’s perfume on the early morning breeze. “No, Ma.It’s not the girl.”

 

“You like her though?You’re about to spend the rest of your natural life with her, so I hope you at least like her.”

 

“I love her.”He mumbled, finding a knothole that had begun to resemble the silhouette of a young Rudy Giuliani.Man, he was going to miss New York.“I didn’t even like her at first, not even a little.But as time has gone on…”Danny trailed off, sensing that Mindy could probably hear him, and he wasn’t ready for that.Not yet.

 

His mother sighed.“This isn’t okay with me, Danny.I don’t want to act like you’re dead.”

 

“I don’t want that either, but that’s the way it has to be.”

 

“No, if you come back with me, and you turn yourself in…”

“Enough!”It came out louder than he intended, and his mother jumped.“I mean, please.That’s enough.”He tried to self-correct, but the damage had already been done.  


 

 

His mother's lip quivered.  “I think you should go, Danny.We’re done here.”

 

“Mrs. Castellano?Can I say something?”Mindy was close by, and of course she would jump into the middle of what was clearly a family matter.

 

Annette swiped at her cheekbone, knocking her sunglasses slightly askew.“What is it, dear?”

 

“The whole time I’ve known Danny, the only thing he’s ever wanted to do was take care of you.He was always just trying to make your life easier.And he never really stopped to ask himself if taking care of everyone else was hurting him.He just did it.And I think I know where he learned it from, is all.”

 

Mrs. Castellano paused for a moment, taking in Mindy’s appearance:the deep maroon wool coat, over the royal blue skinny jeans and the brightly patterned button down shirt.Danny knew how Mindy appeared to people on first impression—how overwhelming she could be to the senses.He still got a little woozy in her presence.“And you are?”

 

“Oops.I’m Mindy?We spoke briefly on the phone?I’m Danny’s…” She threw Danny a _rescue me_ glance that he deftly avoided.Cowardice was a practiced skill where he was concerned.“Friend.”He could see her making a mental note to berate him for leaving her hanging, and he dreaded the first five minutes of silence in the car that would surely be followed by three hours of haranguing until their next location.But until then, he had this to endure.

 

“And I think that you raised a really great son.He’s smart and kind and—“

 

“He has his moments.”His mother shrugged.

 

“He has a lot of moments.And if he goes with me, it’s not because he’s choosing me over you.It’s because he was always choosing someone else, and now he’s finally choosing himself.”

 

That might have been true for Mindy, but it wasn’t true for Danny.And he knew she was lying, from the way she seemed to be plucking her next word out of mid-air, but it was nice that she was trying to defend him.He laid a protective hand on the plane of her shoulder blades, and she relaxed a little against his touch.

 

“Danny, just because you schtupp one girl out of wedlock doesn’t mean you’re bound to her forever.”

 

“We haven’t—" God, she was good.The Annette Inquisition never ended well for him.He’d broken too many collectors’ edition plates of the saints to lie to his mother now.“But when you rob a bank together, you are.And this is what we’re doing.Together.”

 

His mother considered him for a few moments, and a woman walking a small dog approached from the parking lot, causing both Mindy and Danny to stare at the ground intently.They couldn’t afford to be recognized.

 

Danny held his breath until the dog relieved himself nearby, and his mother finally broke the tension, “Danny, you’ve always been a good boy.You never gave me any trouble.Except those times I’d walk in on you, after you’d pruned Mrs. DiNunzio’s shrubs, and she’d be in her bikini.If you could have seen your pinched little red face…”

 

“That’s enough, Ma.”

 

Mindy practically hip-checked Danny to sidle up to the bench, “No, please, tell me more.What else did Danny do besides masturbate?”

 

“It really took up a lot of his time—“

 

“Ma!”Warning number two.

 

“He thought he was being real sneaky about it.He had this certain sock—“

 

“MA!!”

 

He remembered very clearly the morning sometime in his fifteenth year when he woke up to a world that was pitch black, some sort of trick devised by his priest and his mother to warn him of the very real threat of masturbation induced blindness.He never had the heart to tell his mother how he later used that blindfold to jerk off into over her Woman’s Day magazine article about how to dress for your body type.That was the day he learned to truly appreciate a woman with an hourglass shape.

 

“He’s embarrassed.”

 

“Of course I’m embarrassed!This is embarrassing!”

 

“No, Danny, it’s adorable.”Mindy patted his thigh, and Danny forgot where they were and what they were supposed to be doing.“And super gross, you horned up perv.”

 

Before he knew what was happening, his mother had pulled a tiny photo album out of her purse, and was showing Mindy any variety of embarrassing photos, including dance recitals, and pimples, and the time he dressed like Rizzo from _Grease_ for Halloween.“Everyone was dressing like a girl that year!It was the Homecoming theme!”

 

If he’d watched them from the outside, or had the benefit of being a bystander that morning, he’d have seen a happy family poring over old photos, a new girlfriend learning about her boyfriend from the person who knew him best.

 

But that wasn’t what this was.

 

Danny didn’t want to admit it, or really face it at all, but this was saying good-bye to a life that _was_ that simple.And knowing that it was never going to be that simple again.

 

His gut turned heavy with anticipatory dread, the one that pulled him down that morning so long ago in Dr. Shulman’s office, when he knew the life he’d been living was effectively ended.It was almost lunchtime, and the rest stop was starting to fill with hungry picnicking travelers, too many people to be comfortable in too close of quarters.

 

Mindy excused herself; somehow understanding that what Danny needed was a moment alone with his mother.

 

His eyes burned with the beginning of tears, “I don’t want to do this, Ma.”

 

“Then don’t, kid.” She was almost cavalier in her tone, and he stepped back to look at her face.“You know why this isn't working for you?Because it's all a game of pretend. This isn't you.”

“It is me.  I was always making mistakes.”

His mother frowned, the lines deepening by her mouth, “Daniel, my beds were always made, my lawn was always mowed, and my laundry was always neatly folded. You were the one who kept us afloat. Give yourself a little credit.”

It was odd, then, that he had always felt a little like he was drowning.“I will.”

 

“I trust you.I shouldn’t, but I do.So go off with your floozy and send me a postcard when you get there.No names.You remember what happened to cousin Marco.”

 

“Snitches get stitches.I know.”

 

“And if you end up getting her to uh, you know, harbor a little fugitive, make sure you send me pictures.”

 

Danny nodded, “Good-bye, Ma.”He hugged her tighter than he thought possible, worrying about brittle bones and if she was still taking her calcium supplements.

“Mothers don’t say good-bye to their babies, Daniel.”She rubbed at his back.“Stay out of trouble, you big gagoots.And don’t forget to write.”

 

“I won’t.I’ll send you a postcard every Sunday.”If they didn’t have a postal system where he was going, he’d buy one.What was a stamp when you had thirty million dollars in your trunk?

 

She pinched the apples of his cheeks, her eyes watery, “Ah, Danny.I hope you’re better at running than you are at robbing banks.”

 

So did he.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For Smapdi--the Bonnie and Clyde homage she's been waiting for


	7. The Face of Semen and Other Romantic Entanglements

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It all wraps up.

Danny wasn’t sure at which point in his super-sized education he’d learned how to lie, but it was becoming fairly evident that it was the one life area that he didn’t feel woefully underprepared.  

It was just getting harder and harder for him to reconcile that the need to pretend hadn’t vacated the premises along with his medical license.  He was still lying to Mindy, to his mother, probably to himself.

“Could you shoot me again please?  But this time, don’t miss?”   Everything prickled at the surface now, and he sometimes wondered if it showed on the outside without his knowledge; these new tiny spikes of emotion that could catch other humans like burrs.

He sat on his hands to keep from scratching at an invisible itch.

“I would, but I can’t find my gun.”

Her profile seemed oddly cold, and Mindy kept her eyes aggressively attentive to the road ahead.  Her demeanor wasn’t doing much to lessen the clenching he felt around his heart and his windpipe.  Everything felt tight.  He squirmed beneath the restraints of his seatbelt. “Min.  Hey, could we just talk for a second?”  Danny gave her a terse smile and rested the edge of his forehead on her shoulder,  his eyes still tilted upward.  Maybe he’d catch the way her jaw sagged as her facial expression softened.  Maybe.

It was probably a move more vulnerable than he was traditionally willing to be, and yet she still gave him a cursory pat on the head, as if his neediness could be contagious, and she was going to sanitize herself as soon as possible.  

Traffic was light wherever it was they’d ended up; it was all starting to look alike anymore.  Danny sometimes worried as he and Mindy laid in bed at night that they’d made too big of a circle, or rerun an entire route, and the next day he’d wake up in the vestibule of the Sun Trust Bank, the actual scene of his crime.  Because his life had a way of becoming very literal sometimes.

“I’m sorry about your Mom, Danny.  I know she was your best friend.”  There it was, that tiny release of a clenched jaw.  It was just enough, and the traces of anger she seemed to be harboring slowly melted from her features as she pulled over onto the shoulder of the road.

A red two door sedan sped past, causing their own car to shimmy against the drag.

“It’s okay.  I mean, it’s not, but it will be in like seven or eight years.”  If he’d done the math correctly, his mother’s grudges tended toward five years of knuckle clenching and two or three of whispered vendetta.  He felt safer rounding up, unfortunately.

Mindy ran her thumb across his cheekbone briefly, screwing her mouth up in thought.  “You had a chance to say good-bye, Danny, and not everybody gets that.”

“I know.  I know.”  Somehow he doubted that was a comfort to his mother.  “Thank you.  For coming.”

“If I had a dollar,” Her brown eyes were tinged with sadness but sparkled with the double entendre, “I’m glad I came.”

“I know that I couldn’t have done it without your help.  I don’t really do--closure.”  He made a steeple with his fingers, wiggling his fingers in the traditional _see all the people_.  It wasn’t like most of his life didn’t have a resounding finality to it; it just never seemed to happen with his express consent very often.

Danny could tell Mindy was sitting on something, that she had her own set of needs that had to be met, and she was doing her level best to keep those needs reigned in.  To no avail.

“What did you end up telling your Mom about me, anyway?”  It is said in an aggressively casual cadence, like she might engage him in a tickle fight and/or gouge out his eyes if he answered incorrectly.

“Nothing.  I mean, you were there.  You heard what I told her, the whole conversation.  She’s so disappointed in me, Mindy.”

The brown eyes that had been searching his changed track, and fell onto a point beyond him, making it clear that his answer was not to her satisfaction.  “Oh.”

 

“I mean, what was I going to say?  I told her…” Everything about the morning was a blur of exhaust fumes and heartache, but he did know that he’d been completely honest about his feelings.  And that maybe he still had to hold some of them in to protect himself.  “I told her I like you.”

 

“You like me?”

 

He could feel the fire creeping up his neck, “You’re fine.  I like you fine.  A couple weeks ago, I would have ducked behind a mailbox to hide from you on the street and now--”

 

“You’d yank me into a dumpster with you to save me from the cops.”  She smiled.  He'd do more than that.

 

“I would.”  Danny rubbed his thumb across the delicate skin of her wrist, watching as goosebumps rose in its wake.  

She pulled her hand back, gripping the bottom edge of the steering wheel.  “I don’t know, Danny, what Catholics believe about the afterlife or sin or if those hairshirt things are made of real hair.  But I’m Hindu.  I’m coming out of this one way or another.  But I need you to believe that you have another life on the other side.”

He shrugged.  The sunlight glinted on the rearview and reflected in the dark sheen of Mindy’s straight hair.  He wanted to bury his face in it, smell the juniper, and feel like the other life wasn’t a million miles away.  “I don’t know.  I don’t know if it’s better.  I just left my family.  I left the only person that ever…”   _Stuck around_ , he wanted to finish,  but he seemed to be sitting alongside one of those people now.

Mindy cocked her head and studied his face, “Okay, let’s do this instead.  What would make you feel better?  A beer?  A blowjob?”

While the idea of road head was enticing, there was something else he craved more.  Inexplicably, really.  “Pizza.”

“Pizza,”  She repeated, rolling the word over her tongue and shaking her head in disbelief, “You are a simple man, Danny Castellano.”   Mindy contemplated the dial on the air conditioner for a  moment.  “I don’t suppose that Podunkville, Georgia is super famous for its New York style pizza?”

“No, but apparently Silvio Garbini has transplanted his family’s recipe here from Brooklyn.”  Danny pointed at the billboard that loomed just over the highway, as if sent from the heavens, the first thing that had gone his way in the last little while.   He read dutifully from the advertisement.  “Take a left off the exit and just past the bowling alley.”

The pizzeria was in a strip mall, settled between a Boxes Plus and a Mailboxes Etc—“Shouldn’t they just combine?  It seems extraneous to have them that close together and not just fused as one," he groused.  

“We’ll send your suggestion to the Greater Podunkville Chamber of Commerce.”  Mindy jabbed the top of her knee into the back of his, causing him to lose balance and hold onto her to steady himself.  

The restaurant was practically empty, but the air was full of garlic and the scent of baking bread, and it was the closest Danny had felt to being in New York (other than seeing his Ma) since he’d left.  

 

They ordered pepperoni, because Danny doubted the sausage was authentic, and after enthusiastically red peppering two slices, it took only a few bites to come to a realization. “This is the worst pizza I’ve ever had.”

 

Mindy looked up from her slice, the cheese oozing onto her hand.  “I thought that it wasn’t possible to have bad pizza.”

 

Danny shook his head, wondering how pepperoni could taste both mealy and tough at the same time.  “Oh, it’s possible.  Maybe he’s related to Sal, from the other worst pizza I’ve ever had, back home.”   _Home._ He was still working on convincing himself that home wasn’t what he left, but where he was going.  

“Oh god, Danny, I’m so sorry.  I just wanted to cheer you up.  You asked me to murder you, so I figured potentially terrible pizza was a less painful substitute.   And now you’re going to die of indigestion.  You should have taken the blowjob.”

 

Hindsight was 20/20, as always.  “As a former,” He could almost say it that time, without a full fledged wince, “doctor, I will confirm that only FEELS possible.”

 

Mindy deconstructed her slice, piling up tiny circles of meat and casting them aside, “I feel like the pepperoni discard pile is the way to go.  This is the ends, meat.”

After ingesting as much as seemed medically advisable, the waitress deposited their check and offered a doggy bag, which was politely refused.  Danny tipped generously and helped Mindy gather her things, steering her by the elbow to the front door.

 

“By the way, Castellano, I can’t believe you told your Ma I was just your friend.  We’ve kissed mouths, Danny.”

 

“We’ve done more than that.  But I couldn’t announce that to the woman who gave birth to me!”

 

“Okay, fine.  But to make it up to me, you’re going to have to announce it to someone.” 

  
A bored teenager crossed the threshold to pick up a carryout, and Danny encroached on his space in a way that probably could have warranted a throat punch in the City, “I’m kissing mouths with this woman.”

 

Mindy elbowed him in the side. “More.” She whisper-hissed, and he suddenly wasn’t sure why he’d been so afraid of his mother all this time.

 

“I’ve had unprotected sex with this woman!”  At that admission, both the teenager and the cashier exchanged worried glances, and Danny felt Mindy’s fingers on his wrist as she dragged him through the jangling door and back out to the parking lot.  

Her lips were warm and still tasted of rubbery cheese as she kissed him.  “Let’s hit the road, Minnesota Fats.  Our new life is calling.”

 

~

“Is it just me or have we seen this car all day?  The red one, with the fuzzy dice?”  Danny adjusted his mirror, checking the other lanes of traffic as he slid over into the right.

The passenger’s too-tight bun coiled on top of her head, smashed under the likely homemade pantyhose mask, and the driver leaned forward menacingly, the gap in his front teeth readily visible in the rearview.  

“The stitching is exquisite.”  Mindy wolf-whistled.  “So that’s what she was doing with those.”

In one swift and decisive motion, Danny crammed Mindy down onto the floorboard, despite her vocal protest.  “Get down.”  He hissed, swerving back over into the left lane and pressing onto the gas pedal with more force than strictly necessary.

As he accelerated, a bullet lodged itself in the windshield, just to the left of Danny’s head.

Mindy’s eyes widened.

The adrenaline was sour in his throat, his chest a fist of tension.   It was entirely possible that they were going to die, and if they did, she had to know.  “Listen, Mindy, I think we need to settle something right now.”

“What?  That bet we had about whose voice is in the new Walgreens commercial?  I think I can go to my grave with that mystery unsolved, Danny.”

“No, not that bet.  But you know I’m right.  No, something else.”   Tires squealed as Danny applied the brake and the car shuddered to a sudden halt.   Their pursuers and former co-accomplices, Morgan and Beverly, peeled past on the left.  The smell of gunpowder and burned rubber filled the front seat, and Danny made a less than precise U-turn.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about then.   I’m going to need more clues.  Is it bigger than a breadbox?”  

Danny said a silent prayer as another round of bullets pinged metallically against the back bumper and windshield of their tiny pink nightmare.   

“No, we never had our talk.  The state of the relationship one?”  He turned off onto what appeared to be a county road, a one-lane highway lined on either side with flat farmland.

Mindy started to clamber back onto the seat, but Danny pushed her back, “You’re dumping me right now?  In the middle of _The Fast and The Furious 9: Not Really that Fast Anymore_? Seriously?”

His knuckles tightened on the steering wheel.  “No, I’m not---Could you just let me finish?”

 

“I’m sorry.  Do go on.”  She yanked her purse into her lap, clearly looking for something she wasn’t finding.  Receipts and loose sticks of gum spilled out as she rifled.  He briefly considered knocking it out of her hand, because that was sort of the reality with Mindy:  feelings of soul crushing affection followed immediately by bone wearying irritation.

His breath escaped in machine-gun bursts. “I used to help Stevie collect on his debts.  I helped dispose of a body one time.  Once.  I’d never do it again, Min.  The things I did--”

He couldn’t read her face; if it was surprise or revulsion or something else.  “Danny, what are you--”

“If we die today, which seems more and more likely, I just want you to know who you were with all this time.  I did things I’m not proud of, and I lost my whole life because of it, and I’m actually okay with that.  You made it okay.”

“Is this your suicide note right now?  Keep your eyes on the road because I’m too young to die, Danny.”  

 

The red car was attempting to squeeze alongside them, despite the lack of proper road space.  Danny applied the brake lightly, sending the red car ahead of them by a good distance.

 

“No this isn’t my suicide---Stop it.  I love being with you.  And I think I’m falling in love with you.  I love you.  Is what I needed to tell you.”  The windshield webbed with cracks as another two bullets lodged themselves within it;  Beverly and Morgan bearing down on Mindy and Danny, apparently having had made their own u-turn.

Danny pulled the steering wheel violently to the left, and their car bounced through the nearby field, Morgan in hot pursuit.

Mindy’s eyes widened.  She gazed up at him, incredulous.  Dumb-founded, even.  “What are you doing right now, Danny?”

“I think if I learned anything from the last few weeks--”

“Is that your timing sucks?”

“No.  Well, yeah.  But I can’t waste any more of it.”

“Danny.”  Her voice was soft, almost sad.

“I’ve gotta have this.  You.  I tried it the other way.  It didn’t work.  You make it work.”

“Okay. “ She looked around a little manically, like she wasn’t sure if she should jump from the moving vehicle or reach around his neck and squeeze him.  She did neither, mostly to his great relief.

“Okay?  What’s okay?”  His heart was beating in his ears, in his nose, in his teeth.

“We’re going to talk about this.  Soon.  But not now.  Now, you need to step on it.  Get the lead out, Castellano.”

As Danny maneuvered through the field (which thankfully appeared to have lain fallow that season), Mindy hooked one leg over the seat and dropped clumsily into the back, her shoe catching against the roof and tumbling to the floormat.  “Smooth like a ninja,” She declared, still crouching low as she rummaged through the bags and detritus they’d collected over the last few weeks.  “A-ha!” Mindy surfaced, bearing the handgun that he’d surreptitiously stashed in their dirty laundry after the last incident.  

“What the hell are you doing?”

“You really think we’re going to be able to outrun these jamokes?  You’re driving a car with a giant mustache.  We’ve got to fight fire with fire.”  Mindy rolled down the window, aiming the 9 millimeter almost expertly at the rubber of Morgan’s tires.

 

~~

They drove until the gas tank wouldn’t abide another mile, Morgan and Beverly stranded a safe distance behind them.  Danny realized that neither of them had spoken since his confession and their pursuers having been vanquished by Mindy’s sudden sharp shooting, and maybe he felt he was better off that way.  It was a lot to take in, all at once.

 

She’d already sent a series of surreptitious text messages to whatever poor sap was in charge of maintaining her fleet of cars, and another Pink Lady waited for them outside of town as Danny pulled into an unmarked country gas station.  Mindy had promised their final departure point was less than a day’s drive ahead of them, and that was maybe all the time that Danny could spend in yet another Pepto Bismol colored vehicle, with a person that he was sure he had frightened into silence by his declaration of love.

 

The new car smelled of baby powder, which was an improvement from the flop sweat and adrenaline of his previous ride, and Mindy settled into the passenger’s seat as if she planned on sleeping as he drove.  

 

Danny switched over the luggage, doing a quick inventory and pocketing the gun for easy access in case Morgan and Beverly got resourceful somehow in the night.   _She just said okay. Then nothing.  Granted, we were in an honest to God car chase and emotions were running high.  Maybe she thinks it was just...cinematic.  For effect.  Or maybe she doesn’t feel the same way, Castellano.  Nut up._

 

“Danny, there’s something I have to tell you.”   _Oh God, here it comes._  “The reason the island doesn’t have a name is, is because the island doesn’t exist.  I mean, it totally could, but I didn’t buy an island.  It’s not like they have them listed for sale on Ebay.  It’s not all, _One island, gently used, no extradition for bank robbery_.”

His heart sank.  “Oh God.  Is the boat real?”

  
“The boat is real.  And it is really docked and waiting for us.”

“Okay then.  So we’ll buy an island when we get there.  No big deal.”  He had an odd urge to start humming _Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head._

“It’s totally possible.  I’ve seen it on _House Hunters: Island edition_.  We’ll just sail down into the Caribbean and pick up--”  She sensed his hesitancy.  “Please believe me, Danny, we’re going to be okay.  We just outran the guy with a bounty on our heads!”

 

“The fact that neither of us knows a lick about sailing or the very high probability of being murdered by Captain Jack Sparrow notwithstanding,”  Danny reminded her.  

 

“We’ll figure it out.”  She laced her fingers through his on the gearshift, and a tiny shiver ran up his arm.  

 

Squeezing her fingers, he said softly, “Yeah, we’ll figure it out.”  

~~

 

“There’s something else I forgot to tell you, Danny.” Her words are obscured by the roar of the ocean, but he could read her lips.  And the terror in her eyes.

“That’s a long way down, Mindy.”  

The boat was moored on a line of jagged rocks, about a hundred and fifty feet straight beneath them.  

“This is a huge risk.”  Her hair flew across her mouth, flapping it into his own.

He shrugged, “Yeah, so?:

“You’ve never said _yeah so_ to a risk in your life.”

“But I want to now.  Isn’t that what counts?”  

She squeezed his hand.

Meanwhile, he was trying to stop imagining what his skull would look like, open, against one of those rocks.  But it was getting harder and harder to do.

“Mindy, since I met you, I’ve had one bad day after another.”

Her face fell, “That’s the meanest thing that anyone has ever said to me.”

He grimaced, “I’m not done yet.”

“You’re going to say something meaner?  I can’t wait.  You’ll have to beat the time that Jeremy asked me to be a lesbian for the good of the group.”

Danny shook his head.  “Not meaner.  No.  Stop talking.”

 

“Geez.” She crossed her arms defensively.

 

“That’s not…” Ugh, nothing ever went smoothly with this one, “Mindy, even though I’ve had some of the worst days of my life with you, I’ve also had some of the best.”

 

“You might have led with that.”

 

“Sorry.”

 

“It’s okay, Danny.  You’re not...this isn’t really your forte.  I get it.”

 

“No, I know!  It’s just I’ve been trying to be this other person, this person that wasn’t me.  Because being me didn’t really work out that well either.  But the thing was, every time I tried to do that stuff, I failed.  Because it wasn’t honest.  It wasn’t real.  This, the way I feel about you, the things that you’ve brought into my--”

 

“It’s real, Danny.”

 

He nodded.   

 

She looked around, the ocean below, the turquoise sky and cirrus clouds swirling, “This is a real cinematic moment, Danny.  Drink it in.”

 

“You had me at the face of semen.”

 

“Excuse me?”

 

“That night we met, when you were talking about Monica Lewinsky, you called her---”

 

“The face of semen.”  She smiled.  “You listen to me, Danny.  It’s been so long since I’ve had that.”

 

“Me, too.”  He pulled her closer, his hands level against her waist, foreheads tilted together.  “I just wish it didn’t have to end like this.”

Mindy pulled back, her face broken into a clear smile.  “Listen, Butch and Sundance AND Thelma and Louise all had to jump off a cliff to outrun the cops.  We have a distinct advantage in that our movie can actually continue.  They just have to THINK we jumped off a cliff.”

“I really don’t see how we’re getting around it, Min.  You got some bungee cords in your suitcase you didn’t tell me about?”  He poked her arm, “We’re taking the plunge, get it?”

She gave him a brief, yet potent evil eye, “Maybe if everything had gone like it was supposed to, I’d still be with Jeremy, miserable.  And you’d still be pretending like you were a doctor so your family wouldn’t be disappointed in you.”

“And I wouldn’t have gotten to…”

“This is gonna sound really weird, Danny, but even if I have to actually jump off a cliff---This was all worth it.  Because I’ve never lived a fairy tale before.”

“How could you possibly call this disaster a fairy tale?”

“Danny, there was a girl.  There was a boy.  They started off pretty not great.  There was semen.  But then, there were great wars and great stakes.  They realized how much they needed each other, even though they're polar opposites.  They fell in love, despite all odds.”

“Okay, but what about happily ever after?”

“Happily ever after is an idea.”  

“What is this?”

“This is better.”  A siren sounded in the distance, and there wasn’t a fiber of Danny’s being that didn’t believe it wasn’t for them. “Hey, Danny?”

“Min?”

“Whatever you do, don’t look down.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just thought I needed to finish this so I could move onto other things. This last chapter was unbetaed, so all errors are totes magoats mine.


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